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ERIC 


AMERICAN 
ARCHITECTURE 


BY 
FISKE KIMBALL 


ILLUSTRATED 


Hill 


INDIANAPOLIS and NEW YORK 
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 


| Copyniaxr, 1928 
By Tue Bosss-Merrux Company 
Printed in the United Site 2 ‘ 
: | zy of 


“BROOKLYN, N. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
Oe Ee ie) 18 

ME ete ISEGINNINGS .  .  . wlll LT 

II Tse Arrerc iow or THE Mippue Acrs . 27 
III From Jacospean To Grorcian. .. . 385 
IV Tue Heypay or THE Encuisu Cotonites. 41 
V Provinctat Types oF THE SEABOARD. . 57 
VI SPANISH AND FreENcH Outposts. . . 63 
VII First Works UNDER THE ReEpusrtic . . 69 
VIII Tue Geeex Revivan. .... . 95 
IX Romanticism AND THE GoTHIc . . . Ill 
™ 4 Conrousion or Toneurs . . . . 119 


XI THe Srace or Mopernism: New 
MarTeriAts AND New Trrpses.... 1385 


XII Waar Is ArcnitectureE? THr Pours or 


Mopernism: FuncTion AnD Form. . 147 

XIII Tue Trivumpen or Crassican Form . . 171 
may Counter-Currents . . . . . . 191 
Meee PeeOPENSENT . . « +. «  » « + 208 
DMPRIANHATTAN 5 . «¢ + «© 0). » al 
ee ie she ae ee eal a wae 
Ret fe BBL 


URRY 


moo OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


FACING PAGE 


“English wigwams’—types of the first shelters 
in New England . se tee 
A log house of the Swedes—Delaware County 
Pennsylvania 
An early Anglican church—St. Luke’s, Isle of 
— Wight County, Virginia . ; 
An early evangelical chapel Muhlenberg s church 
at Trappe, Pennsylvania 


The home of a New England divine—the Parson 
Capen house at Topsfield, Massachusetts . 


The Anglican communion—Saint Paul’s ia a 
New York 


The old State House in Philadelphia —Indepen 
dence Hall : 


A Virginia gentleman’s seat—-Westover on the 
James 


The colonial style in flower—the Brewton portico 
Charleston 


The colonial style in flower—the Great Chamber 
at Mount Pleasant 


A New England farmhouse—the Barker + howe, 
Pembroke, Massachusetts , 

A Dutch farmhouse—the sida Diecast New 
Lots, Long Island : 


A Pennsylvania eae Sister house at 
Ephrata 


20 


21 


28 


29 


36 


37 


46 


ANG 


50 


51 


58 


59 


60 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATION S—Continued 


FACING PAGE 


A Pennsylvania barn—Bucks County . 61 
The Spaniards in Texas—Mission San José, San 
Antonio 64 
The Spaniards in California—Mission Santa 
Barbara 65 
On a Louisiana plantenon yy ae on the Mis- 
sissippl ; 72 
The first building of the Republio—the Virgin 
Capitol, Jefferson’s model 73 
The federal Capitol—Thornton’s ae 82 
France in America—the New York City Hall 83 
Rome in America—the University of Virginia 86 
An Adam interior—the oval wey at 
Lemon Hull, Philadelphia 87 
An Adam house in New England—the Lyman 
house at Waltham, Massachusetts . 90 
A house of the eet the home of 
Jefferson . OL 
The beginnings of the Greek revival—the Bank of 
Pennsylvania, Latrobe’s design . 96 
The triumph of Greek revival—the Bank of the 
United States, Philadelphia . 97 
The Greek Column—the ibrencs Monument 
in Baltimore . . 100 
The Greek House—Andalusia on the Delaware . 101 
The early Gothic revival—the Eastern Peniten- 
tiary, Philadelphia nO 
Gilded reminiscences—Biltmore : Ses 2. 
Later Gothic—the Chapel at West Point . . 156 


ee 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATION S—Concluded 


FACING PAGE 


The steel frame—the poe viegatiia Saint 
Louis . 


The return to classical form—the Villard pega 
New York 


The music of surface—the Boston Public Library 


The triumph of classical form—the Court of 
Honor, Chicago . 


The music of space—the ca Mas ole 
room, New York . 


The poles of modernism: the ae padae 
tial) Building, Buffalo; Apartments for the 
Century Holding Company, New York . 


Old material and new form—the Wainwright 
tomb, St. Louis 


New use and new form—the Larkin Factory, 


Buffalo 


New material and new Seen ee Oak 
Park 


The cathedral of Mammon—Woolworth Buildings 
New York 


The arrow—Bush tower, New York . 
Masses—Hotel Shelton, New York 


Mass and line—the American Radiator ee 
New York : 


Mass and line—the New York cape siete Build- 
ing, New York : Tops ses ae 


The grotesque—Times Square at night 


The magic mountain—Lower Manhattan from the 
Bay 


The canyon—Lower Broadway 


. 157 


. 164 


165 


ma 


. 183 


. 186 


. 222 
. 223 


(¢ 


5 


~ FOREWORD 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
FOREWORD 


AMONG a people with the vast material task 
of conquering the wilderness of a continent, 
mastering the riches of its soil, its forests, its 
waters and mountains, artistic expression takes 
chiefly the form of building, of architecture. It 
is in architecture, of all the arts, that America 
has said best what it has had to say. It is in 
architecture that America, grown to imperial 
might, has said something new and vital in art. 

Its history has sometimes been represented as 
a degeneration. Under Ruskin’s system of 
moral values, falsely imported into the field of 
art, the Colonial day has been glorified as a 
golden age of honest traditional craftsmanship, 
the modern vilified as false and base. We can 
not take this view. To us the Colonial style, with 


[13] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


all its provincial charm, is still in leading strings. 
Only with the founding of the Republic does a 
creative spirit appear, a new sense of form. 
Then, as a new civilization takes shape, amid the 
hum of harvester and factory, a new material, 
steel, leaps from the earth. Its towers, rising in 
sunshine and storm, glowing in the night, em- 
body the aspiration of a new world. 


[14] 


hope 


_ THE BEGINNINGS 


oo 


CHAPTER I 


THE BEGINNINGS 


Into the wilderness of virgin forest came, in 
the seventeenth century, English, Swedes and 
Dutch. A few were gentlefolk, used to the 
houses of brick and stone and framed timber 
then confined at home to their own class. The 
majority were yeomen, tenants, or farm laborers, 
coming from the “frail houses” of wattle, clay, 
sod and thatch, in which the rural population of 
Europe then had its miserable shelter. There 
was little in their past existence for them to miss. 
Glass windows and brick chimneys were luxuries 
to which they were not accustomed. To all but 
the Swedes an abundance of timber was a nov- 
elty. To the men of every country there came 
for the first time the boon of free land for all. 

Never had there been such a leveler. In their 
first winter at Massachusetts Bay, Winthrop 
had to release his servants, who took up their 
own tracts. Proprietaries and grants there 


[17] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


might be, but, with land in inexhaustible supply, 
these would not keep men from streaming to the 
frontier of ownership. From that day nearly 
to our own, when the public domain approaches 
exhaustion, this freedom of the land is the key 
to American development. Democracy with its 
far-reaching effects was rooted in the soil, and 
for over two hundred years only the enslavement 
of another race could keep men in bondage. 
Colonists, be they Greeks at the Pillars of 
Hercules, Romans in the forests of the Rhine, or 
Europeans on the opposite fringe of the 
Atlantic; strive first to make their new home like 
the old. To create in a new continent a new 
civilization and a new art is farthest from their 
thoughts. All their effort is to secure, and then 
to hold against all the odds of difference and of 
distance, what they knew in the mother country 
at the time they left. Changes are forced on 
them by the new environment, to be sure, but 
they come against all the resistance of colonial 
conservatism. New England, New Nether- 
lands, New France and New Spain were, so long 
as they remained colonies, as near like their 
mothers as filial imitation could make them. 


[18] 


THE BEGINNINGS 


Thus at first the settlers built their houses like 
those they had known. ‘The common folk at 
Jamestown and Plymouth made shelters with 
slanting poles covered with brush, reeds and 
earth, perhaps over a low wall of stakes and 
wattle plastered with clay. These were the 
“English wigwams” of early chroniclers—by no 
means like those of the Indians, as some have 
thought. Sometimes, as in the church at Ply- 
mouth and later in the houses of English settlers 
in East Jersey, sawn planks were driven into the 
ground to make what were called palisaded 
houses. In Connecticut and in Philadelphia 
“caves” or “cellars” were made by digging into 
the banks, walling and roofing with sods and 
brush. 

The log house, of horizontal logs notched to- 
gether at the corners and chinked with clay, 
which has been ignorantly assumed to have been 
borrowed from the aborigines by the first set- 
tlers, was unknown either to the Indians or to the 
early English colonists. It seems to have been 
brought in from the Continent by the Swedes of 
the Delaware, the first settlers from northern 
Europe, where it was known also by the Swiss 


[19] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


and Germans who followed. It first commended 
itself to the English through its superior strength 
for forts and prisons. Before the end of the 
century “garrisons” and blockhouses of squared 
logs dotted the New England rivers and coasts. 
Prisoners could not be held in the frail shelters, 
and in Georgia, at first, “log house” definitely 
meant a jail. Obviously suited to the densely 
forested new country, where trees must be felled 
to clear the land for tillage, the log house grad- 
ually became the typical home of the later fron- 
tiersman. aes 

Long before this, and soon after the first set- 
tlement, the governors, the ministers and the 


men of prominence had begun to build houses of — 


frame, of brick and of stone, and these materials 
were used also for the churches. The typical 
better house of the rural districts and towns in 
England and central Europe at the beginning of 
the seventeenth century was what we now call the 
half-timbered house. It had a heavy hewn frame 
of oak, jointed and pinned, and filled in with 
“cat-and-clay” (rolls of clay and straw), with 
sun-dried brick, or with wattle, plastered with 
clay and washed with lime. Such houses were 


[20] 


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SIVMOIA\ HSIIDN 


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eruvayAsuuag ‘AyUNOD IRMPTIG—SICIMG AHL JO aAsAOfY DOT V 


UOSUYOL SNPUDUWP PUD 40040TT *O 
Ae we nat oe - OR nee 2 o Alga e 


THE BEGINNINGS 


built for Endecott and Winthrop at Salem and 
Charlestown. Some built a century later by the 
Germans still survive in central Pennsylvania. 
Very soon, however, it was found that the severer 
climate of America demanded some exterior 
covering. The English supplied this by hanging 
the house with weather-boards, not uncommon 
then in Kent, where they survive in houses which 
clearly show the origin of the typical American 
form. The filling of the frame behind by brick 
or plaster long survived, although it was gradu- 
ally disused, and the timber house came to have 
the open frame we know to-day. 

Although thatched roofs survived until the end 
of the century, and slate and tile came into use, 
the characteristic roof covering was shingle. Far 
from being regarded in England as inferior, it 
was there so costly as to be restricted to church 
steeples where weight was a consideration. On 
the American coast cedar was everywhere, and 
shingle replaced thatch two centuries before the 
use of thatch was generally abandoned abroad. 

By 1650 the ordinary artisan and farmer in 
the older colonies had a small house of frame, a 
story and a half in height, one room on each 


[21] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


floor—superior perhaps to what he could have 
hoped for in the Old World. ‘That wooden 
shutters still often served in place of glass case- 
ments, and that many chimneys remained of 
catted clay, was only what was usual on the same 
social level in Europe. 

The exhaustion of the forests in England dur- 
ing the later seventeenth century led to the 
abandonment of frame construction there, and 
the increasing use of brick and stone by the com- 
mon man, whose position had been greatly im- 
proved during the Civil Wars. In America wood 
remained plentiful. It was made cheaper still 
by sawmills, scarcely known in England, intro- 
duced from the Continent. Even until to-day, 
after three centuries of wanton cutting, wood has 
remained at an advantage in cost over brick or 
stone. ‘The dampness of masonry houses, in a 
climate of extremes, also caused prejudice 
against them. Nevertheless houses and churches 
of brick or stone were built from an early time in 
those colonies where the materials were readily 
available. In Pennsylvania—founded near the 
end of the century—they formed the majority. 

The crucial material for building in stone was 


[22] 


THE BEGINNINGS 


lime. It was lack of limestone near Tidewater 
that hampered the New England and Virginia 
colonists from building much in brick. Governor 
Winthrop tried building a stone house at Med- 
ford with clay mortar, but the rain washed it 
quickly to the ground. Oyster shells furnished 
the only resource, and when the Indian beds of 
these neared exhaustion the authorities had to 
forbid the use of oysters for anything but food 
and bait. Roger Williams hed limestone at 
Providence Plantation and started a flourishing 
trade, while his people built houses exceptional 
for their vast chimneys of stone, filling the whole 
end of the house. On the Schuylkill there was 
abundance of lime, and the colonists, familiar 
with London as rebuilt after the Great Fire of 
1666, used brick and the fine ledge stone which 
was so plentiful and so easily split. 

The legend of brick brought from England, or 
from Holland, is repeated of almost every fine 
old brick building in the colonies. The records 
show this to be a myth, except for a few cases in 
New Netherlands. Brickmaking is one of the 
simplest of arts. Brickmakers came with the 
_ first settlers. Clay and wood to burn it were 


[23] 


seen the soil of the Tidewater would 
importing brick was bringing coals to 


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AGES 


~~ 


CHAPTER II 


THE AFTERGLOW OF THE MIDDLE AGES 


In THE first buildings of frame and of 
masonry, indeed in all those constructed down to 
‘the end of the seventeenth century, we see a 
survival of the art of the Middle Ages. Steep 
roofs, leaded casements, clustered chimney-stacks 
and exposed construction, the most striking 
features of these buildings, all had come down 
from the Gothic. They had persisted in the 
great noble houses of Elizabethan and Jacobean 
England, and were a greater part of their effect 
than the new Italian adornments of the classic 
orders. In the churches and the small houses of 
England, the Italian influence had not yet been 
felt at all when the first colonists set sail. In 
rural England and in Germany the peasant and 
ordinary dweller of the rural town built on for 
generations after this in the spirit of the Middle 
Ages. It is not surprising that in America, on 


the extreme outskirt of European civilization, 


[27] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


the Renaissance should have been long in making — 
itself felt. Even for the rich, even for the gentle- 
men who came, the decent satisfaction of needs 
was long all that could be secured. Under these 
conditions the Gothic stock of north Huropean 
art flourished on here for a long time before 
receiving the grafts from the south. 

The churches were the first fruits of common 
effort, whether in the Biblical communities of 
New England where town and parish were one, - 
or among the dispersed plantation parishes of 
Virginia. In both,the Gothic forms were used, 
but the type of edifice for the established Church 
of England differed markedly from that of the 
more extreme ‘Protestant cults, in accordance 
with their models in the Old World. 

The Anglican church-building of Virginia was — 
merely a rural English parish church of its time, 
built across the water. The earliest, still sur-— 
viving in part, was the one at Jamestown. A 

large square tower stood before a buttressed _ 

nave. In Saint Luke’s Church, built on the same 

model near by in Isle of Wight, we see the details _ 

of the upbuilding: a steep roof with stepped 

gable and pointed Gothic windows divided by 
[28] 


Photograph by H. P. Cook 


AN CHURCH 


St. Luke's, Isle of Wight County, V 


1 


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irginia 


euvapAsuuag ‘addeay, ye younyD ss1oquatynyy 


IddVHO IVOITAONVAY ATIVE NY 


wnasnyy niwpajyisuuag ayz fo fisaqsnop 


AFTERGLOW OF MIDDLE AGES 


tracery of brick. Only in the square blocks at 
the corners of the tower, and in the triangle 
above the door—faint suggestion of the temple 
front—do we find the first hints of classic in- 
fluence. Trinity Church, New York, built 
within the eighteenth century and burned in the 
Revolution, was still Gothic in its form, as were 
the stone churches of the Dutch in New Jersey, 
and the Welsh chapel of Saint David’s at Rad- 
nor in Pennsylvania. 

The New England meeting-house was a dis- 
senting chapel of the kind which came into being 
at the very beginnings of Protestantism, with 
Luther. English examples are little known, but 
they exist, and show all essentials of the scheme: 
a broad hall with galleries on three sides, the high 
pulpit on the fourth long wall opposite the 
entrance porch. The earliest which survives in 
the Colonies, the “Old Ship” at Hingham, still 
shows amid modern gimcracks the curved braces 
which gave it its name. No unspoiled church 
interior of this early character survives in New 
England, but one in which it persisted long after 
1700 may be seen in Muhlenberg’s church at 
Trappe in Pennsylvania, the cradle of the Amer- 


[29] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


ican Lutheran communion. Here one may still 
_ find the box-pews, the rough tiers of gallery 
benches, the posts and rails of a character which 
in England would be called Jacobean. Accord- 
ing to the Lutheran ritual the sanctuary is here 
at one end of the church, with the altar in the 
center, the high pulpit at one side. 

The timber houses of the seventeenth century 
survive in numbers in New England. Originally 
they were but a single room in depth, one or two 
rooms long, at most two stories and a half in 
height. Their great oak and pine frames are 
elaborately jointed, and richly beveled and 
molded to form also the chief decorative element. 
In the more ambitious houses, as in the medieval 
houses of Europe, the upper story overhung the 
lower, with moldings or pendants hewn on the 
frame. Banks of hinged casements with small 
square or diamond-shaped leaded panes pierced — 
the broad surfaces of weather-boards. Exact- 
ness of symmetry was little regarded: the spac- 
ing followed the unequal size of rooms behind, 
after the frank practise of the Middle Ages. In- © 
side, the cavernous fireplace, spanned by a great 
beam, was the focus of family life. The parti- 


[30] 


AFTERGLOW OF MIDDLE AGES 


tions and sometimes also the outer walls of the 
rooms were wainscoted with broad boards molded 
at the joints. 

In the brick houses the most striking features 
were the tall chimney-stacks which rose at the 
gable-ends, sometimes with a cluster of separate 
flues and with the gable itself stepped and 
curved, as in the Jacobean houses of England. 
Bacon’s Castle in Virginia now gives the best 
idea of the type, which was illustrated also in the 
great house of Peter Sergeant in Boston (later 
the Province House), and at Medway and Mid- 
dleton in Carolina. The addition of a porch in 
front and stairs at the rear might make the house 
in the form of a cross, as at Bacon’s Castle; or it 
might have its plan in the shape of H or E, sur- 
viving from the time of Elizabeth, as at Fair- 
field, Virginia, and the first City Hall in New 
York. Long afterward indeed, the type per- 
sisted in Tuckahoe, home of the Randolphs, in 
Stratford, home of the Lees, and in Browne’s 
Folly at Beverly, Massachusetts. At the Mul- 
berry in Carolina there were even four corner 
towers. 


[31] 


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CHAPTER III 


FROM JACOBEAN TO GEORGIAN 


THE first considerable use of the newer classi- 
cal or academic forms in English architecture 
was in the rebuilding of London after the Great 
Fire of 1666; their first considerable adoption in 
America followed the founding of Philadelphia 
by William Penn in 1682. Even here leaded 
casements, the most obvious of survivals from 
the earlier day, were used at first, but in the 
same buildings there appeared the signs of 
change. These expressed both the practical 
trend to larger accommodations with greater 
convenience and privacy, and the artistic 
tendency from the nervous emphasis of the 
Gothic with its revealed structure, to the calm of 
the classic with its abstract decorative form. 

Some characteristic changes were the doubling 
of the rooms to make deeper, four-square plans, 
the raising of the stories, the flattening of the 
roofs and the cutting of their upper slopes to 


[35] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


form the “gambrel,” the tendency to abandon the 
gable and have a level cornice all about, the plac- 
ing of a molded chimneypiece about the fire- 
place. The little house built, before his arrival, 
for William Penn himself was perhaps the first 
to show many of these. With the opening of the 
new century they gradually became common 
everywhere. Then, too, the sash window with 
wooden bars, sliding up and down as we know it, 
was adopted. Paneling replaced sheathing in 
the wainscot of the interior. 

Thus came into being the fine early Georgian 
house of the seventeen-twenties, as we find it in — 
the McPhedris house at Portsmouth, the Robert 
Brewton house at Charleston, at Shirley in Vir- 
ginia, at Stenton and Hope Lodge and Cedar 
Grove near Philadelphia. As yet there was no 
rich doorway, like the one from a later genera- 
tion at the McPhedris house, no portico like the 


one added a century afterward at Shirley. All — 


was quietude, simplicity. The bold line of the 
cornice with its brackets broke the clear sunlight | 
on walls which derive their chief or only orna- | 
ment from the sober ordered windows with small 
panes, broad frames and bars. Inside the treat- 


[36] 


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ANIM] GNVIONG, MAN V dO AWOPT AIT, 


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YOK MON ‘JedeyD s[ne_ JUureg 
NOINODWWO) NVOIIDNY GH, 


qup fo wnesnyy uvyyodorazy ayy fo fisajino0p 


FROM JACOBEAN TO GEORGIAN 


ment was simple, with bold projecting moldings 
and panels, but with little use as yet of pilasters 
or the richer classic elements. 

In the same vein of simplicity were the typical 
churches of the time: the Old South and Christ 
Church in Boston, Bruton Church at Williams- 
burg and Christ Church in Lancaster County, 
Virginia, St. Paul’s at Edenton in Carolina, all 
of mellow brick; the Tennent Church at Free- 
hold, New Jersey,—cradle of Presbyterianism in 
America,—of white shingle. 

The early college buildings at Harvard, Wil- 
liam and Mary, and Yale were not more elabo- 
rate, although for William and Mary Sir Chris- 
topher Wren seems to have sent a design from 
London, the only real one of his in the Colonies, 
where so many buildings have a legend of his 
authorship. Essentially they were barracks of 
fine brickwork—justifying, in spite of their 
pleasant texture, Jefferson’s scornful later com- 
ment that “but that they have roofs, they might 
be mistaken for brick kilns.” 


[37] 


IV 


. HEYDAY OF THE ENGLISH 
= COLONIES 


es 
are om 


vi 


CHAPTER IV 


THE HEYDAY OF THE ENGLISH COLONIES 


THE Colonial style came to flower in the fifty 
years before the Revolution. This was a period 
of rich doorways, of Palladian windows, of tall 
pilasters, of porticoes rising one on another, of 
elaborate mantels and overmantels, of carved 
staircases, of ornamented ceilings. 

The Tidewater planters of Virginia and Mary- 
land and Carolina, the patroons of the Hudson, 
the merchants of Philadelphia and New York, of 
Boston and Salem and Portsmouth had accumu- 
lated wealth. They lavished it on houses which 
were luxurious, if small judged by foreign 
standards. ‘The Anglican Church was now well 
supported in the provincial capitals; philan- 
thropy began the founding of hospitals and 
libraries; the colonial assemblies, with their grow- 
ing power, housed themselves worthily for the 
first time. 

The more ambitious models of Jones and 


[41] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


Wren and their followers in England now began 
to be observed. Jones’ style, “solid, propor- 
tionable according to rule, masculine and un- 
affected,” lay at the base. Wren had brought 
to this more of the movement and fancy of the 
southern baroque, had made it less severe, more 
‘ntimate. The forms of detail were broken and 
interwoven, the graceful opposed curves of the 
swan-neck appeared in the crown of doorways 
and chimneypieces. 

The new forms were derived in America less 
from any great influx of fresh craftsmen, who 
came in but small numbers, than from books. 
The academic system of the eighteenth century 
was codified in books with a simplicity and preci- 
sion which have never been rivaled. As fast as 
they appeared, these books brought to America 
every new phase of building fashion, from the 
heavy Palladian style of the followers of Jones 
to the gay French and Chinese fantasies of Chip- 
pendale. Architecture then formed part of the 
education and interest of the gentleman. The 
owner could indicate, in these books, his prefer- 
ences for the general scheme, as the competent 
workman—in Philadelphia some member of the 


[42] 


HEYDAY OF ENGLISH COLONIES 


Carpenter’s Company—could derive from them 
the details of his moldings and proportions. 
The absence of any body of professional archi- 
tects was thus not serious. Even in England 
they were rare. Only one of reputation, John 
James of Greenwich, seems to have crossed the 
sea for a brief period. Carter Burwell and 
_ Governor Tryon brought English master work- 
men, but even these were exceptional. In general 
the design was given by some gentleman of taste. 
The colonial governors, fresh from England, 
were several times laid under contribution, like 
Alexander Spotswood for Bruton Church and 
Sir Francis Bernard for Harvard Hall. The 
painter Smibert turned his hand to architecture 
_ for Faneuil Hall in Boston. The prince of the 
colonial amateurs was Peter Harrison of New- 
port, a gentleman whose talents were in demand 
far from home, and who took his reward in votes 
of thanks and pieces of plate. His buildings set 
a new standard of classical dignity and correct- 
ness. At the very end of the period Thomas 
Jefferson, in devouring his books, gave to Pal- 
ladio the closest reading he had yet received. 
Finest of the churches were those of the estab- 


[43 ] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


lished communion in the seaboard towns, modeled 
on the new London churches by Wren and 
Gibbs. Charleston and Philadelphia took the 
lead. Saint Philip’s had three tall porticoes 
about the steeple and western porch. Christ 
Church, by John Kearsley, a gentleman-amateur, 
had for the first time long rows of tall interior 
columns like Saint Bride’s in London, and an 
external treatment of arches framed by an order. 
The fine tower was added later by Robert Smith, 
head of the Carpenter’s Company. Boston 
followed with King’s Chapel, its interior remark- 
able for great double columns. It was the work 
of Harrison, who also designed Christ Church 
in Cambridge, of rich sobriety, and the fine 
synagogue in Newport. Saint Michael’s in 
Charleston out-rivaled its older neighbor by a 
still finer portico and richer steeple, after one of 
Gibb’s published designs. In New York a 
Scotch builder, one MacBean, surpassed all the 
others with the vaulted interior of Saint Paul's 
Chapel and its great portico toward Broadway. 
In such churches the tables of the law, the high 
six-sided pulpits with their suspended sounding 
boards, were lavishly adorned with pilasters and 
panels. 


[44] 


HEYDAY OF ENGLISH COLONIES 


The dissenting meeting-houses reflected some 
of this new splendor. Although the Puritan 
plan with the pulpit on the long side survived in 
retired towns down to the Revolution the 
tendency was now to adopt the more traditional 
plan. ‘The front was adorned with pilasters. 
he steeple became universal. The light open 
belfry of columns, modeled on the early one of 
the Old South, was still used in the Connecticut 
Valley, as at Farmington, down to the close of 
the period. In the First Baptist Church at 
Providence, however, when it was rebuilt on the 
very eve of the war, the cultivated amateur, 
Joseph Brown, closely patterned it on the 
famous London steeple of St-Martin-in-the- 
Fields’. 

Public buildings had begun about 1700 with 
the old State House in Boston, the old City Hall 
in New York, still half J acobean, and the old 
Capitol at Williamsburg, in which a crude 
portico in two stories was attempted. A genera- 
tion later, Andrew Hamilton, Speaker of the 
House, gave a design for the State House in 
Philadelphia, later to become famous as Inde- 
pendence Fall, which was of full Georgian char- 


[45] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


acter. On the exterior there were straight- 
forward brickwork and classical details without 
any attempt at academic grandeur. Inside, how- 
ever, during the score of years the finishing was 
in progress, were created some of the most 
ambitious of the Colonial effects, an arched and 
columned hall and a vast stairway. Faneuil 
Hall, like Christ Church, had ordered arches in 
distant reminiscence of the Roman _ basilicas 
and the Colosseum. Peter Harrison came well 
abreast of the time abroad when he built, about 
the middle of the century, the Redwood Library 
and the Market or Town House at Newport. 
The Library was a little English garden temple, 


with portico and wings, very sedately monu- ue 


mental. The Market had a range of tall uniform 
pilasters through its two upper stories, above 
an open arcade. It was the motive, in little, of 3 
old Somerset House in London. In spite of its — 
scholarly derivation, Harrison’s work does not 
smell of the lamp. Repose and suavity of pro- 
portion, a musical harmony, make it live and 
give it a distinction unique in the Colonial work. 

In the finer houses which reflected current 
fashion there was the same striving for abun- 


[46] 


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I i) 


Pt cb 


+ 


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Soule dy} UO 19A0}SI MA 


IVIG SNVWALLN 


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V 


HEYDAY OF ENGLISH COLONIES 


dance and dignity through the ordered array of 
line, surface, mass and space. 

The plans tended now to become wholly sym- 
metrical. The house of four rooms to a floor, 
with stair hall running through from front to 
back, was the commonest of types, but in the finer 
houses, outside of New England, it was not un- 
usual to have a great entrance hall free from 
stairs. ‘This was the case with the Van Rens- 
selaer manor house, with Mount Pleasant, White- 
hall and Mount Airy. Other elements than the 
rectangle were rare in Colonial plans, the 
octagonal bay or room being the only variant. 
Some care for more complex effects of interior 
space was shown by the screens of columns in 
the halls at Cliveden and at the Chase house in 
Annapolis. 

On the exterior there was at first an elabora- 
tion of individual elements. A rich door focused 
attention, as at Westover on the J ames. ‘The 
corners of the house were adorned with rustic 
blocks, the principal windows surrounded by 
broken frames of columns or pilasters, as in the 
great Hancock house in Boston, of squared 
stone. When Isaac Royall raised his fine house 


[47] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


at Medford to three stories, he even framed all 
the windows of the front. 

Soon there came a plastic enrichment of the 
mass, through a central projection or pavilion 
with its own gable, as at Rosewell, Mount 
Pleasant and many other houses. 

Most characteristic, however, was an adorn- 
ment by the stately forms of the five orders. 
These might be merely isolated trophies of the 
fashion and classical cultivation of the builder, 
like those framing the front of the Royall house 
or the pavilion of the Hooper house in Danvers, 
which Lord Howe once chose as his headquarters. 
With greater knowledge they might form part 
of some more general treatment, like the proud 
row along the front of Governor Shirley’s house 
in Roxbury, or the fourfold frontispiece of the 
lost Pinckney house in Charleston. 

For the fullest effect there was a portico of 
columns standing free. It ranged from the 
little shelter of two columns over the door to the 
great porch, four columns in width and two in 
height, which won for John Drayton’s solid 

Carolina house the extravagant name of Dray- 


ton’s palace. Miles Brewton’s great house in — 


[48] 


OP ee ee : 7 : - 
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Te eee vs 


HEYDAY OF ENGLISH COLONIES 


Charleston and Governor John Penn’s vanished 
mansion, Lansdowne, owed their unusual mag- 
nificence to similar two-story porticoes; and 
Jefferson projected one, more chaste in propor- 
tion, in his building plans for Monticello at the 
same period, on the eve of the Revolution. 

The portico embracing both stories in a single 
flight of taller columns, which we tend to think of 
as the most characteristic Colonial feature, was 
scarcely applied to houses until after the Revolu- 
tion. It was only Colonel Roger Morris of New 
York, in the fine mansion still redolent with later 
memories of Madame Jumel and Aaron Burr, 
who took, before the war, this final step in 
Colonial grandeur. 

Most striking of the single features was the 
doorway. Flanked by pilasters or columns, and 
crowned by its little gable of triangle, segment or 
scroll in infinite variety, it gave the accent to the 
plainest front. As the Revolution approached 
and arched doors became common, the fanlight 
appeared above, its tracery of wood still massive, 
in harmony with the solidity of the style. 

In the interior too there blossomed the abun- 
dant flowers of classical ornament. The panel- 


[49 ] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE — 


ing was divided by pilasters which flanked the 
chimney-breast and the arches of hallway and 


alcove. Doors, windows and cupboards were ~ 


set in tabernacles of molding, bracket, gable and 
shell. The fireplace was more richly framed, 
although a mantel-shelf was still often lacking, 
and columns appeared by the sides only in the 
imported chimneypieces of marble. Above, a 
panel was elaborately bordered and crowned. 
This decoration reached its apogee in such rooms 
as the drawing-room of the Brewton house, with 
its fine proportions, its coved ceiling, its broad 


panels from dado to cornice, its doorways, chim- — 
neypiece and portraits, reminiscent of those of 
Jones’ splendid Double Cube at Wilton, justly | 


thought the finest room in England. : 
The stairs were given an important place and 


lavishly ornamented. Brackets at the ends of — 
the steps were scrolled and carved, balusters were 


turned with moldings and spirals. The Hancock 


house, with three different varieties of spiral 
balusters on each step, set a new fashion much 
followed in New England. Its newel, a tour de 


force of one spiral within another, oppositely 
winding, was likewise imitated for a generation. 


[50] 


THe Cotoniat STyLe 1N FLOWER 


The Brewton portico, Charleston 


queseotq JUNO }P JaquIeYyD yeoryg YJ, 


UAMOTY NI AIALG IVINOTOD AH, 


wnasnyy nruvapisuuag ay? fo fisajun0p 


) 
y 
¥ 
. 


HEYDAY OF ENGLISH COLONIES 


Farther south it was commoner to carry the 
balusters themselves about the newel, beneath 
the hand-rail ending in a scroll. 

A. final touch of gaiety was added in the last 
houses before the Revolution by the fantastic 
shell work, derived from the French style of 
Louis XV, which came from England along 
with the Chippendale style in furniture. The 
French, the Gothic and the Chinese “tastes” 
were artlessly mingled without incongruity in 
this playful ornament. Leafage curled through 
shells in the scrolls flanking the fireplace of the 
Brice house at Annapolis; Chinese frets and 
carved friezes ran about the base, the dado, and 
the cornice of the Philadelphia mansions; the 
overmantel threw up a spray of curving fronds. 
In the panels of the mantels the animals of Adsop 
enacted their fables within their borders of 
tattered shell. 

The ceilings, too, now bore their part in the 
beauty of the interior. At Belmont in Phila- 
delphia the molded plaster, still heavy with 
reminiscences of Louis XIV, shows coats of arms 
and instruments of music. At Westover on the 
James, at Charleston in the Brewton and Huger 


[51] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


houses, at Philadelphia in the Powel parlor, at 
Yonkers in the Philipse Manor, the moldings 
disappear and the delicate foliage and shell work 
itself makes an airy pattern. On the eve of the 
Revolution, at Annapolis and at Kenmore in 
Virginia, the scrolls again vanish in favor of the 
rosettes and festoons which announce the reac- 
tion to a more severe classic ornamentation, 
which was to triumph in the Adam style after 
the war. | 

In all these finer houses we search in vain for 
a note of fundamental difference from English 
style. The absence of country palaces like those 
of the English nobility can not obscure the equiv- 
alence of the American houses with those of the 
smaller English gentry of the day. The delay 
and compromise in the adoption of newer archi- 
tectural fashions of the metropolis was not — 
greater than in provincial England. In New 
England, to be sure, the greater survival of wood 
gave a different balance between the prevailing 
materials, but elsewhere the majority of the 
finest Colonial houses were of masonry. Even 
in New England, where later, as in England, the 
influence of the Adam style was to brig more 


[52] 


HEYDAY OF ENGLISH COLONIES 


slender proportions and greater delicacy, more 
suited to execution in wood, no such change took 
place within the Colonial period. The heavy 
classic proportions still ruled. The ideal of the 
Colonial style remained always: conformity to 
current English usage. 


[53] 


CHAPTER V 


PROVINCIAL TYPES OF THE SEABOARD 


Ir was in the houses of the by-roads, the 
simple farmsteads lagging behind the march of 
progress, that characteristic local types differ- 
ing from those of England gradually developed. 
In these isolated regions the workmen, instead of 
piquing themselves on a perfect following of the 
latest London fashion, built forward uncon- 
sciously in new directions. ‘These buildings are 
more racily American, springing from the very 
soil of their own colony and district. 

The New England farmhouse long preserved 
the lean-to which it inherited from the seven- 
teenth century. The unbroken slope of roof 
toward the north was well suited to the severe 
winter, celebrated in Whittier’s Snow-Bound. 
The sheds and barns extended from it in con- 
tinuous endless range. A vast central chimney 
anchored the house against the sweep of the 
storms. In the Plymouth Colony, on Cape Cod 


[57] 


- AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


and on the island of Nantucket, shingles were 
used for the walls as well as for the roof. Else- 
where clapboards, perhaps graded in width, 
formed the familiar wall covering. In the 
Connecticut Valley the doorway with pilasters 
and opposite broken scrolls, a reminiscence of the 
Hancock house, for which the stone had been cut 
at Middletown, had a special vogue. The detail, 
half remembered, was repeated with the quaint 
grammar of dialect. | 

About New York, extending in East Jersey 
and on Long Island, a different type prevailed— 
the so-called Dutch Colonial. The simplest 
houses of the Dutch under English rule, as we 
see them up the Hudson at Hurley and New 
Palz, were of whitewashed stone with steep 
chimneyed gables and little projection at the 
eaves. ‘The better farmhouses, two rooms in 
depth, came to have a roof of lower slope, with 
a very wide overhang at front and back. Already 
before the Revolution it had become customary 
to extend this still farther, and support the front 
on posts to form a porch called the piazza. The 
painter Copley, visiting New York just before 
the War of Independence, found these a novelty 


[58] 


SHesnyovssvyy ‘oyorquiag ‘esnoy JayIVg oJ, 


ASQOOH WV ANWION MAN VW 


wy fo wnasnyy unqvodosary ay) fo fisajanog 


pus, Buoy ‘sjoT MoN ‘asnoy afjedey aq, 
ASIOHWUV, HOLA V . 


' yup fo wnasnyy wnjyodo.apy ayy fo fisajunop 


PROVINCIAL TYPES OF SEABOARD 


and was the first to introduce them to New Eng- 
land. The gambrel roof, rare in most of the 
provinces of Holland, was taken up in New 
York as in the other English Colonies, but as- 
sumed a special form with a lower angle. The 
red Bergen sandstone, the long shingles, helped 
to give a strong local flavor. 

In Pennsylvania the pervasive ledge stone 
gave a common element to the farmhouses of the 
English, the Welsh, and the Germans. As the 
eaves of the Dutch houses of New York over- 
hung the walls, the broad hood at the second floor 
of the houses at Germantown sheltered those of 
the lower story. 

In German counties like Berks, Lebanon and 
Lancaster, the language and art alike remained 
those of the old country. Interiors like those of 
the Muller house at Millbach, with fanciful raised 
panels, square balusters and richly wrought 
hinges, preserve much of the savor of the Rhine- 
land. At Ephrata, the stronghold of the Dun- 
kards, are monastic buildings of catted timber 
covered with stucco, tall-roofed and many-dor- 
mered. Most striking perhaps of all the Pennsy]l- 
vania buildings are the great barns with their 


[59] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


massive walls of stone, their sides, “overshot” to — 
shelter the animals, supported on massive white- 
washed pillars. 

In the South the absence of a middle class left 
little between the mansions and the humble 
quarters of the blacks. The minor plantation 
houses clung to the older type of steep gable 
roof with end chimneys. The mild climate per- 
mitted the kitchen to be in a detached building, 
forming with the smoke-house, dovecot and other 
outbuildings, a picturesque group. 

These were Americanisms, differing from the 
King’s English, as did the dialects of English 
districts themselves. ‘They gave the Colonial 
utterance a tang of its own, without contributing 
anything fundamental to the common stock of 
European civilization. An independent initia- 
tive in architectural style, destined to have, in 
the sequel, far-reaching consequences, appeared 
only after the Revolution. 


[60] 


Photograph by Lewis L. Emmert 


A PENNSYLVANIA Doorway 
The Sister House at Ephrata 


Courtesy of Charles Sheeler 


A PENNSYLVANIA Barn 


Buck’s County 


, 
‘ 
i 


a 


AND FRENCH OUTPOSTS _ 


‘ p 
‘ 
_ 
r 
\ 
14 
» . 
‘ ; 
a b 
t: Le 


CHAPTER VI 
SPANISH AND FRENCH OUTPOSTS 


On THE borders of the Gulf, along the Rio 
Grande, on the shores of the Pacific, outposts of 
Spain and of France were built in the Latin 
tradition, already a century old in America be- 
fore the founding of Plymouth. 

At St. Augustine the Governor’s House with 
its high stuccoed wall, its tile roof and hanging 
baleony, the Cathedral with its pierced belfry, 
its rich doorway against the whitewashed front, 
spoke the language of the Spanish Mediter- 
ranean. 

In Texas, in New Mexico, in Arizona, the 
Spanish Jesuits, from the end of the sixteenth 
century, were founding missions. They built m 
the manner of the Indians, of adobe and of sun- 
dried brick, with flat roofs of clay on crude 
wooden beams projecting through the walls. For 
a century the forms were of the simplest, as in 
the barn-like Chapel of San José at Laguna. 


[63] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


Doors and windows had not yet the simplest 
frame. Only the pierced belfry and the Cross 
marked the purpose of the building on the ex- 
terior. Inside, as we still see at Chimayo, carved 
brackets for the roof-beams recalled the Re- 
naissance in Spain, while in the painted altars — 
and railings the Indian artist mingled his gay 
coloring. In the eighteenth-century churches, 
rich baroque carving was lavished on the win-— 


dows and the altars. The fronts of San 


Xavier del Bac in Arizona, of the missions at 
San Antonio, had a profusion of columns and 
arches, of niches and scrolls. Ornate belfries 
rose over great towers, vaults and domes spanned 
the interior. a 

With the expulsion of the Jesuits, the task of 
colonizing California fell to the Franciscans. Up 
the coast they marched in the last years of the 
eighteenth century and the first of the nine- 
teenth. A chain of missions stretched from San 
Diego to San Francisco and even north of the 
Bay. The primitive background, the ascetic tra- 
ditions of the Franciscans and the dying fire of 
the baroque conspired to make them of great 
austerity.. Broad walls with massive buttresses, 


[64] 


Courtesy of I. T. Frary 


THe SPANIARDS IN TEXAS 


Mission San José, San Antonio 


™ 


BlNqIvgG v{ULS UOISSIF[—VINUOATIVD NI saduvINVdS any 


Aas 


0D P ang “0 “QO fig ydvsbooyg 


es, 


@ 


ASS Sas nat Ani SRE eT 


ae 


SPANISH AND FRENCH OUTPOSTS 


arched corridors and cloisters with supports 
_ heavily square, beamed or vaulted naves, curved 
gables and belfries, were the few and simple 
elements, variously combined in groups of mov- 
ing simplicity and beauty. The great buttressed 
flank of San Gabriel, the ruined arcades of San 
Juan Capistrano, the sober front of Santa 
Barbara against its background of mountains, 
brand themselves deeply on memory and imagi- 
nation. 

The few civil buildings of the Spanish South- 
west are even more unassuming. ‘The Palace at 
Santa Fé is of the simplest adobe with clay roof. 
The houses of the Estudillo at San Diego, of the 
De Ja Guerra at Santa Barbara, the Rancho 
Camulos, with their white walls, tile roofs and 
green patios, are the chief. They are enough, 
however, to have had across a century an 
influence abidingly felt. 

In New Orleans on the Mississippi it was the 
French who made the beginnings. French were 
the long windows opening on iron balconies, 
French the rustic blocks of the Archbishop’s 
palace. The Spaniards came, and after the 
great fire of 1788 rebuilt the Place d’Armes in 


[65] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


ordered arcades. Latin, New Orleans was to re- 
main, even when it fell before the triumphant 
advance of the young American Republic. 


[66] 


VII 


FIRST WORKS UNDER THE 
REPUBLIC 


CHAPTER VII 
FIRST WORKS UNDER THE REPUBLIC 


It was with the founding of the Republic that 
America came of age. The new political order 
had far-reaching consequences. It called into 
being governmental buildings which were not 
only more important than those of the Colonies 
hitherto, but were of types radically new in the 
modern world. In all classes of buildings con- 
nected with political and social institutions, the 
democratic and humanitarian ideals of America 
brought into being arrangements very different 
from those which were traditional in Europe. 
Republican institutions gave a new significance 
and a new form to the buildings for the legislative 
assemblies of the novel republican states and of 
the great nation soon to be welded from them. 

Most vital, however, was the very fact of in- 
dependence itself. The fathers of the Republic 
were eager to throw off provincial dependence 
in other matters than that of sovereignty, to get 


[69] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


rid of colonialism, of foreign authority. ‘They 
wanted to do this even in language. Noah Web- 
ster, in his dictionary, sought to codify American 
usage. They wanted to do it also in art. The 
leader of the movement was Jefferson, the author 
of the Declaration of Independence itself. He 
hoped to make an artistic declaration of indepen- 
dence as well. 

In his own final judgment, witnessed by his 
epitaph, he appears above all as a lover of free- 
dom, whether in politics, in religion or in 
science; but the freedom thus loved from youth 
was essentially the freedom of reason to reach its 
own conclusions, not freedom to degenerate into 
formless anarchy. ‘Trained in the law, he de- 
manded logical system in thought. He insisted, 
too, on going to the sources in every field: in his 
fundamental study of the common law, in his 
researches among fossils, in his Biblical criticism. 
He sought the earliest precedents, among the 
Anglo-Saxons, the Greeks, the Romans. Hence 
the paradox that Jefferson, the apostle of indi- 
vidualism, should have chosen as his first mas- 
ter in architecture, Palladio, who passes as the 
chief representative of dogmatic authority. The 


[70] 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


reconciliation lies first in the character of rea- 
soned law borne by Palladio’s architectural 
system. However artificial it may seem to us, it 
had in common with nature this supposed law- 
fulness and reasonableness, which was doubtless 
what Palladio himself felt when he wrote: 
“Architecture, the imitator of Nature.’ Here 
was the relation to natural law, one of Jefferson’s 
fundamental conceptions. With the weight of 
primitive and classic precedent which Palladio 
sought to adduce and Jefferson has been quick 
to respect, the preponderance of spiritual agree- 
ment between them had been overwhelming. 

Jefferson now turned to the ancients, to the 
Greeks and Romans whose republics then, in the 
freshness of modern republicanism, seemed very 
near. He hoped to secure the respect of foreign- 
ers, without copying them, to be at once novel 
and correct. 

He had excellent preparation for the task 
which his political career as Governor of Vir- 
ginia, Secretary of State and President gave him 
enviable power to accomplish. With the best 
private library of architecture in the Colonies, he 
had already made himself a competent designer 


[71] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


before the Revolution. While the war still raged 
he proposed rebuilding the Governor’s Palace at 
Williamsburg on the lines of a classic temple, 
with fronts of eight columns; and, when the 
capital was moved to Richmond, suggested 
modeling the Governor’s house there on Pal- 
ladio’s Villa Rotonda with its dome and porti- 
coes. Immediately afterward he went to Paris 
for five years as American Minister, and traveled 
extensively in France, England, the Low Coun- 
tries, Germany and Italy. His account books 
show that no month passed, scarcely a day 
passed, without his systematically visiting the 
buildings. What attracted him chiefly were the 
Roman monuments and their adaptations in the 
France of the hour. At Nimes, as he wrote the 
Comtesse de Tessé, he gazed “whole hours at 
the Maison Quarrée, like a lover at his mistress”: 
in Paris he was “violently smitten with the Hotel 
de Salm, and used to go to the Tuileries almost 
daily to look at it’; in southern France he was 
“Immersed in antiquities from morning to night.” 
“For me,” he wrote, “the city of Rome is actually 
existing in all the splendor of its empire.” — 
His chance to turn the architecture of his 


[72] 


Iddississt oy} UO spIsuUINg—NOLLVINVIg VNVISIAO'T ¥ XO 


yooy panyony fo fisajinog 


corre eae 


Jepout suossager ‘foyrdeg BIUISITA YJ, 


orimtaAday AHL JO ONIGIING Isl AH, 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


country into a new channel came, while he was in 
Paris, with the building of the Virginia Capitol 
at Richmond. He saw in this “a favorable op- 
portunity of introducing into the State an ex- 
ample of architecture in the classic style of 
antiquity.” Not content merely with the use of 
classic elements, he proposed a veritable repro- 
duction of one of the most famous antique build- 
ings—the temple at Nimes known as the Maison 
Carrée. The interior was divided to give rooms 
for the assemblies and the courts, the wall pierced 
_ with windows, but the general form and propor- 
tions remained unchanged. The vast portico was 
united with the mass by an unbroken cornice. 
The simple and crystalline cubical form, the 
colossal scale of the columns, gave the building 
a novel dignity expressive of the majesty of the 
sovereign state. The portico was a frontispiece 
to all Virginia. 

It has been little realized that the design long 
preceded anything similar abroad. The classic 
revival was indeed a movement which already 
had its beginnings there and which there also had 
the same ultimate ideal—the temple. Classic 
examples had already been imitated abroad in 


[73] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


garden temples and commemorative monuments, 
but never on any such large scale and never in a 
building intended for practical use. The conser- 
vatism and logic of the architects rebelled. Hiven 
in England, the leader in the classical movement, 
although Greek details began to appear as early 
as 1760, the temple form was not adopted bodily 
for any monumental building before 1830. ‘The 
Virginia Capitol preceded the Madeleine in 
Paris, first of the great European temple re- 
productions, by more than a score of years. 
Jefferson’s insistence on the support of antique 
authority in the Republic anticipated the attempt 
of Napoleon to gain the same sanction for his 
ownempire. In the classical movement America 
was thus not merely a follower—rather, a leader 
in pressing it to its extreme consequences. 

Although the design was but crudely carried 
out, the building deeply stirred the American 
imagination. Robert Mills, a master of the next 
generation, wrote: “I remember the impression 
it made on my mind when first I came in view 
of it coming from the South. It gave me an idea 
of the effect of those Greek temples which are 
the admiration of the world.” 


[74] 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


The classical ideal thus embodied was ulti- 
mately to rule in America to a degree unknown 
in Europe, but a generation passed before its 
sway became universal. Leopardi has well 
described how the man of genius takes ten steps 
forward—too far for the crowd to follow. Only 
when lesser men have taken a single step in that 
direction will the multitude go with them, and 
so step by step finally reach the goal. 

The rank and file of craftsmen long continued 
to work in the style of their fathers. The New 
England country churches like those of Lenox 
and Bennington, the simple farmhouses, were 
untouched by any breath of innovation. The 
ideas of church builders for a long time did not 
go beyond the London steeples and porticoes of 
Gibbs. Many of the finest houses built in the 
years just after the Revolution, such as the 
Joseph Brown house in Providence, the John 
Reynolds (Morris) house in Philadelphia, show 
nothing fundamentally novel. It is works like 
these which have caused buildings erected even 
after 1800 to be called “Colonial,” and to merit 
the name of post-Colonial. 

Meanwhile many buildings began to show a 


[75] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


larger dignity and a more classical character. 
These qualities appear first in the public build- 
ings in which the other states and the new 
nation, following the lead of Virginia, housed 
their governments. Not merely new capitols, 
but whole new capitals, had to be built. The up- 
country men, like Jefferson, were demanding the 
removal of the seats of government inland from 
the old seaboard towns. New towns, more 
central, were decreed at the falls of the rivers: 
Richmond in Virginia, for which Jefferson gave 
a gridiron plan; Columbia in South Carolina; 
Washington, the Federal City, on the Potomac. 

For the inauguration of ‘the federal govern- 
ment, New York undertook an ambitious 
remodeling of its old City Hall. The direction 
of the work was entrusted to a French Major of 
Engineers, Pierre Charles L’Enfant. He had 
fought gallantly through the Revolution, and 
had already given proof of his artistic gifts by 
designing the altar-piece and choir rail of St. 
Paul’s Chapel in the florid French style of 
Louis XV. In the Federal Hall he achieved a 
studied elegance new to those who saw it. A tall 
open portico with sculptured gable, raised a 


. [76] 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


story above the street, provided the setting for 
Washington’s oath of office, and was deeply im- 
pressed on spectators of the solemn ceremony. 

Among the crowd of onlookers was Charles 
Bulfinch, a young gentleman of Boston, whose 
easy circumstances had permitted him to make 
the grand tour of Europe. He had seen the 
monuments of Paris under the suggestions of 
Jefferson and had retraced his route in the 
South, pressing on to Rome. He brought back 
from New York to Boston a drawing of the 
Federal Hall, which, published in the Massachu- 
setts Magazine and widely copied, served as the 
model for the capitol of South Carolina. 'This 
was the work of James Hoban, a young Irish- 
man who had won a medal in the architectural 
school of the Dublin Society, and had worked on 
the Royal Exchange and Custom House in 
Dublin. 

Bulfinch himself had already submitted a de- 
sign for a State House in Boston. He now 
testified to his classical enthusiasm by a Roman 
column on Beacon Hill and a triumphal arch for 
Washington’s reception in Boston. When the 
State House came to execution in 1795 he gave 


[77] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


it the arched and colonnaded portico of the 
Garde-meuble in the Place de la Concorde, and 
crowned it with the dome, later gilded, which 
served the Bostonians of Oliver Wendell Holmes 
as “the hub of the universe.” 

For the projected Federal City, L’Enfant 
was employed to make the plans. Like all his 
undertakings, it was conceived on a vast scale, 
more suited to the ultimate growth of the coun- 
try than to its actual means. He took as his 
model the capital of his native country, Amer- 
ica’s ally. Versailles had given the very sugges- 
tion for the founding of new capitals in the 
wilderness, apart from the turbulence of old 
centers—for St. Petersburg, Karlsruhe, and a 
host of others. The city of the Sun King was now 
to give the pattern for the seat of the republican 
government. The Capitol occupied the place of 
the palace; the President’s House, of the 
~ Tyianon; the Mall, of the park. From the chief 
centers radiate the principal avenues, giving as 
L” Enfant said, “a reciprocity of sight” across the 
gridiron of minor streets. It was a grandiose 
conception, a “city of magnificent distances,” 
which has taken a century to come into its own. 


[78] 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


“When it is proposed to prepare plans for the 
Capitol,’ Jefferson wrote to L’Enfant, “I 
should prefer the adoption of some one of the 
models of antiquity which have had the appro- 
bation of thousands of years; and for the Presi- 
dent’s house I should prefer the celebrated fronts 
of modern buildings, which have already received 
the approbation of all good judges. Such are 
the Gallerie du Louvre, the Garde meubles, and 
the two fronts of the Hotel de Salm.” At the 
instance of one of the Commissioners of the 
Federal City, L’Enfant asked for the plans of 
the Virginia Capitol, but they were lost in the 
catastrophe which followed. 

-_ L’Enfant’s vaulting ambition and insubordi- 
nation to all authority justified Jefferson’s 
prophecy, years before, that a superintendent 
from Paris would consider himself “the Super- 
intendent of the Directors themselves, and 
probably of the Government of the state also.” 
For the designs of the federal buildings the 
authorities had to look elsewhere. Jefferson 
proposed a competition on the lines of those he 
had known in France. He drafted the require- 
ments for the Capitol and the President’s House, 


[79] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


and when at first it seemed that no worthy plans 
would be submitted, himself sent in a design for 
the latter, modeled on his favorite Villa Rotonda. 
In the end a host of builders and amateurs com- 
peted. For the President’s house a project by 
Hoban, following one of Gibbs’ English en- 
graved designs, with some reminiscences of 
Leinster House in his native Dublin, carried the 
day. 

For the Capitol, the ablest of the competitors 
was Stephen Hallet, the first highly trained, pro- 
fessional architect to come to America. He was 
an architect expert juré du rot, who had crossed 
the Atlantic as a professor in a chimerical 
Franco-American academy of the fine arts, and 
had been left stranded by the French Revolution. 
In his first design for the Capitol he created the 
type with a tall central dome and wings for the 
two chambers, the scheme which was ultimately 
to be adopted almost universally for American 
legislative buildings. Jefferson persuaded him to 
send in, instead, a temple scheme with colonnades 
all about, and this was preferred among the de- 
signs first submitted. Hallet was retained as 
superintendent, and made further studies in 


[80] 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


which he returned to the dome, but none quite 
satisfied the authorities. 

At this juncture there appeared on the scene 
a gifted amateur, William Thornton, who was to 
wage many a battle against the professionals be- 
fore they finally mastered the field. “He was a 


3 


scholar and a gentleman,” wrote a contempor- 


a Quaker 


by profession, a painter, a poet, and a horse 


ary, “full of talent and eccentricity 


racer—well acquainted with the mechanic arts.” 
Born in the West Indies, he spent his boyhood 
in England, became a Doctor of Medicine at 
Edinburgh, spent some time on the Continent, 
and came to America about the time of the 
Constitution. He had already succeeded in com- 
petition for the design of the Philadelphia 
Library. “When I traveled,” he wrote, “I never 
thought of architecture, but I got some books 
and worked a few days, then gave a plan in the 
ancient Ionic order, which carried the day. . . . 
What will not Encouragement do? I afterward 
had confidence enough to draw a Plan and 
Elevations for the Capitol of the United States, 
which after much deliberation, opposition, and 
long Examinations, was adjudged to me.” 


[81] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


Aided by a timely glimpse of Hallet’s studies, 
he did indeed produce a design which, in spite of 
its minor incompetencies, received the prize. Its 
feature of appeal, which remained in the design 
of the old Capitol through all the vicissitudes of 
its building and rebuilding, was a low Roman 
dome. 

The city of New York, already anticipating 
its future greatness, undertook its new City 
Hall, very ambitious for the day, which now 
stands amid towering skyscrapers as the mile- 
stone of a century of material growth. It was 
designed by Joseph Mangin, a Frenchman 
whose origin and fate are alike unknown, and 
built by John McComb. In its elements and 
style it is wholly French. ‘The hollowed front 
with delicate columns one above another, against 
a rich arabesque of arched and grooved and 
paneled wall, the majestic circular staircase with 
its double flight, its dome above a ring of 
columns, are features familiar in many French 
buildings of the eighteenth century. Rarely had 
they been combined with more taste and a juster 
sense of proportion. 

Among the colleges which now rapidly multi-- 


[82] 


USISOp SUOJUIOYL—TOLdVO IWuaUay AIT, 


ssatbuoy fo havsqvy ay} fo hsajumog 


[ NC ee 
Swan Ne 


ssbeseate Cine 


3 bis ‘ es ca GES i 


Cigurtam of Grosvenor Atterbury 


France 1N AMERICA 
The New York City Hall 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


plied on every hand, the fruitful idea was again 
that of Jefferson. He wrote in 1810: “I con- 
sider the common plan followed in this coun- 
try . . . of making one large and expensive 
building, as unfortunately erroneous. It is 
infinitely better to erect a small and separate 
lodge for each separate professorship, with only 
a hall below for his class, and two chambers above 
for himself; joining these lodges by barracks 
for a certain portion of the students, opening 
into a covered way, to give dry communication 
between all the schools. The whole of these ar- 
ranged around an open square of grass and trees 
would make it, what it should be in fact, an 
academical village.” 'This conception he realized 
in the University of Virginia, which remains to 
this day the most beautiful of American groups. 

Up and down either side of the shaded Lawn 
are the tail, storied porticoes of the temple-like 
Pavilions, which once housed the classes of the 
ten schools as well as their heads. Between them, 
fronting the low dormitories, are the long white 
rows of the Colonnades. At the head, on the 
highest ground, stands the Rotunda, circular 
- like the Roman Pantheon, with its dome and 


[83 ] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


lofty spacious Corinthian porch. It is, in Jeffer- 
son’s phrase, the perfect model of “spherical 
architecture,” as the temples beside it are of the 
cubical. Beyond the lawn colonnades, facing 
outward, are second rows of dormitories, the 
Ranges with their red arches. 

Ordered, calm, serene, it stirs our blood with 
a magic rarely felt on this side of the ocean. A 
single impress of form unites all the parts into 
an overwhelming artistic effect. The grandiose 
symmetry of disposition, the rhythmic alterna- 
tion of pavilion and colonnade, the jewel-like 
simplicity of the major units, square-faceted and 
round, with their contrast like diamond and pearl, 
the eternal recurrence of the white columns, as 
a treble against the ground-bass of red walls, are 
elements of this effect which in its perfection 
surpasses analysis, and tells us we are in the 
presence of the supreme work of a great artist. 

At Union College in Schenectady, Joseph 
Ramée, a French emigré, created at much the 
same time another ordered group of peaceful 
harmony of effect, and anticipated Jefferson by 
a few years in adopting, for the central unit, the 
monumental form of the Roman Pantheon. 


[84] 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


With the growth of the towns under Hamil- 
ton’s policy of favoring manufacture and com- 
merce, types of buildings hitherto strange in 
America were called into being. The Bank of 
the United States in Philadelphia raised a proud 
marble front in imitation of the Exchange in 
Dublin. ‘The first fine theaters were built to 
satisfy the taste created by wandering English 
companies, and nurtured by our travelers abroad. 
In New York the Park Theater, with its many 
balconies and pilastered front, was the work of 
the French royalist, Marc Isambard Brunel, dur- 
ing his brief sojourn. In Boston, where Puritan 
scruples were now relaxing, Bulfinch built a 
theater of monumental effect, richly adorned. 

In the houses of leaders of society in the young 
republic there came, along with new ideas of 
form, the idea of modern convenience which had 
originated in the France of Louis XV. The old 
plan with central hall tended to give place to 
more flexible arrangements, with more numerous 
and distinct elements, and with greater privacy. 
The reception-rooms, living quarters, and serv- 
ice arrangements were segregated with a new 
care. Suites of bedrooms and dressing-rooms 


[85] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


were created, sometimes with alcove beds a la 
francais. Service pantries made their appear- 
ance, stairways multiplied and were secluded 
from the stranger’s gaze. In the finest town 
houses, like those of William Bingham in Phila- 
delphia and Harrison Gray Otis on Beacon 
Street in Boston, the reception-rooms formed a 
suite in a principal story raised a story from the 
street. 

A notable resource was gained by the use 
of forms of greater variety, to overcome the 
monotony of the rectangle in Colonial buildings. 
The octagon, the circle and the ellipse enriched 
the possibilities of composition in both mass and 
space, which were now studied with a new 
solicitude. The favorite plan among the mem- 
bers of the “Republican Court” was the French 
scheme with a projecting salon occupying the 
place of honor in the center of the garden front. 
Jefferson had already adopted this at Monticello, 
with an octagonal salon, before the Revolution. 
In its typical French form, almost universal 
under Louis XV, the salon was elliptical. Such 
an elliptical drawing-room, placed to one side, 
first appears here in William Hamilton’s great 


[86] 


viuBarA JO ApSdoatuy) oy, 


VOIUAWY NI aWoyy 


paam ‘fv fiq ydnshojoyd 


Photograph by Charles Whitenack 


Aw Apam INTERIOR 


\ 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


house, the Woodlands, at Philadelphia. It is a 
house remarkable for its freedom and novelty of 
composition, both as regards convenience and 
privacy, and as regards variety of spatial effects 
achieved by its circular columned vestibule, its 
curving stairs, its great semicircular bays and 
niches. ‘The elliptical salon in the center figured 
in Hoban’s winning design for the President’s 
House—the White House—in the houses of 
Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, 
of General Knox, Secretary of War, and of such 
leaders of wealth and fashion as Joseph Barrell, 
Theodore Lyman, Governor Gore and Harrison 
Gray Otis about Boston, Henry Pratt in Phila- 
delphia, and Nathaniel Russell in Charleston. 
Many of these in New England were from the 
designs of Bulfinch, as were those built with 
circular salons, more in harmony with classical 
taste, for James Swan and Jonathan Mason. 
Classical influence showed itself, otherwise 
than in the plan, in two quite different ways. 
One was the use of the delicate Adam propor- 
tions and details, suggested by the ornaments 
newly become familiar in the excavation of the 
buried cities. The other involved the adoption 


[87] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


of the monumental portico and heavy propor- 
tions of the temple. One dominated the North; 
the other, the South. 

The first employment of the Adam forms was 
in the ceilings of plaster in slight relief, so charac- 
teristic of the style. Washington himself led the 
way in work executed at Mount Vernon during 
the darkest days of the war. When John Penn 
came to America, the year after the peace, to 
build on the banks of the Schuylkill his little 
country seat, Solitude, the rich Adam ceilings of 
urns and garlands, of rosettes and candelabra, of 
airy scrolls and chimeras, were almost its sole 
ornaments. At the Woodlands, soon after, the 
doorways, too, had the new classical enrichments, 
and the entrance front showed slender Adam 
proportions, while the portico toward the river 
was of contrasting monumental grandeur. ‘Two 
vanished houses in Philadelphia, Bingham’s great 
town house, modeled on Manchester house in 
London, and the vast mansion built for the Presi- 
dent, helped to establish the style. The impulse 
to further imitation of the older Louis XV style, 
which might have been given by the marble 
“folly” begun by L’Enfant for Robert Morris, 


[88] 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


was lost when Morris became bankrupt and the 
unfinished house was demolished. 

In New England, Bulfinch introduced the new 
manner with tall pilasters of slight projection, 
light cornices and balustrades, shallow surface 
arches, slender colonnettes, narrow window-bars, 
fanlights and side-lights with tenuous tracery of 
metal, mantels with delicate imported composi- 
tion ornaments of festoons, urns and classical 
figures. His Boston houses in Beacon Street, 
Park Street, Tremont Street and in the van- 
ished Franklin Crescent, first of the coherent 
blocks of city residences, gave the models. In 
Salem his faithful pupil, Samuel McIntire, the 
gifted carver, executed the fabulous and ill-fated 
Derby mansion—thought “more like a palace 
than the dwelling of an American merchant”— 
on lines Bulfinch suggested, and gave the town 
its present impress. To Portland the new doc- 
trine was brought by Alexander Parris; to New 
Haven, by David Hoadley; to western Massa- 
chusetts, by Asher Benjamin, who made Bul- 
finch’s formule universally available by his pub- 
lications. In New York and Albany, McComb 
and Philip Hooker shared the same tendencies. 


[89 ] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE > 


On the borders of Chesapeake Bay, Thornton 
gave admirable models of the Adam style in 
Homewood, near Baltimore, in the Octagon at — 
Washington, in Tudor Place at Georgetown. 
Even in Virginia, the stronghold of the 
monumental classic, the delicate Adam treat-— 
ment made the effect of the lovely Barton Myers 
house in Norfolk. At Charleston the chimney- 
pieces showed the same decorative motives as 
those of distant Salem and Portland. 

The builders did not always use ornaments — 
cast from London molds. Robert Wellford, who 
claimed to be the first American maker of com- 
position ornament, not only imitated these, but 
put on the market patriotic subjects such as the 
Battle of Lake Erie and the eagle mourning over 
the tomb of departed heroes. Local house- 
joiners even developed their own means of sug- 
gesting the Adam effects by simple use of their 
ordinary tools. Rosettes and garlands were 
made with flutings and nicks of the gouge, or 
with auger holes of varied sizes. These in- 
genious adaptations to tool and material are 
among the most charming of minor American 
architectural devices. 


[90] 


s}josnyorsseyy ‘WIVYy[R A, Jv asnNoPyT UuvULA’T ou, 


GNVIONG MAN NI asnopxY Wvay NY 


unuhy inyjitp fo fisazanop 


Photograph by Roger Millen 


A Howse or rue PrepMont 


Monticello, the home of Jefferson 


FIRST WORKS UNDER REPUBLIC 


Meanwhile, however, the example of Jefferson 
was giving a direct impulse to more rigorous and 
severe classical treatment in house building. 
Retired from Washington’s administration, he 
undertook the remodeling of Monticello in a 
more Roman style. The attics were pulled down 
to give an effect of a single story as in Roman 
houses and their French adaptations; a Roman 
dome was added over the salon as in the Hotel 
de Salm. In the great houses of his friends in 
the Piedmont, at Montpelier, Edgehill, Farm- 
ington, Ampthill, Barboursville and Bremo, he 
used the massive square white portico with tell- 
ing effect against the walls of brick. When he 
became President he ordained for the White 
House the great circular portico of the river 
front, the long colonnades of the offices at either 
side. In the University of Virginia, at the end 
of his career, he finally achieved his prophetic 
early ambition to fit the whole house within the 
rectangular mass of the temple, an extreme of 
classical ardor which had no parallel abroad. 
The students spread his example all up and 
down the South. 


[91] 


2% 


ie 


VIiIl 


THE GREEK REVIVAL 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE GREEK REVIVAL 


Harp on the heels of the first adoption of 
Roman forms came the Greek. The leader here 
was a newcomer, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a 
professional of thorough training who had 
learned his Greek details in England. He found 
himself in an atmosphere of classical enthusiasm 
greater than that of England itself—of allusions 
from Plutarch to Brutus and to Cincinnatus, 
with whom the Revolutionary patriots had been 
identified. He supplied the knowledge, but the 
stimulus to bodily imitation of ancient buildings 
came from the initiative of Jefferson and the 
fervor of clients and laymen. 

Latrobe’s opportunity came at the turn of the 
century, with the building of the Bank of Penn- 
sylvania—destroyed, alas, long ago. It was all 
of marble. The general form was rectangular, 
with porticoes at each front of six graceful Ionic 
columns, their capitals modeled on those of the 


[95] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


Erechtheum. In the center was the circular 
banking-hall, domed in masonry on the pattern 
of the Pantheon. Beaujour, the French major, 


“a man of great talents . . . long in Greece 


and Egypt . . . a perfect judge of the fine 
arts,’ summed up its qualities in the phrase, 
“§i beau, et si simple.” ) 

On the exterior, at the side, there are many 
little departures from the antique model which 
show that the architect was not altogether happy 
in the straight-jacket of the temple form. La- — 
trobe himself testified, after the death of the 
bank’s president, Samuel M. Fox, that the “ox. 
istence and taste” of the building were due to” 


him. Thornton, Latrobe’s great antagonist, — ; 


likewise bore witness to this by putting satiri- 
cally this remark into his mouth: “The Bank of 
Pennsylvania I know has been much admired, 
but it would have been much handsomer if — 


Joseph Fox and the late John Blakely, Esqrs. a 


directors, had not confined me to a copy of the 
Parthenon at Athens.” 'Thus the authorities of 


the bank, who owed much to Latrobe’s skill, ap- — s 


pear to have been ultimately responsible for the 
essentially American literalness of its classicism. 


[96] 


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IVAIAGY MATL) AELL £6) Hawa, aH, 


muvapisuuag fo fizaoogy )voo sry 9U} fo fisajmop 


THE GREEK REVIVAL 


Jefferson, who had become President in 1801, 
was quick to see Latrobe’s ability and to give 
him official encouragement as he had the other 
men of high training. He created the post of 
Surveyor of the Public Buildings of the United 
States and placed Latrobe in charge both at the 
Capitol and at the White House. The old Hall 
of Representatives, burned by the British, was a 
triumph of their collaboration. The House and 
Senate Chambers as Latrobe rebuilt them after 
the War of 1812 were Greek hemicycles of great 
dignity. By his personal stamina, and by the 
support of Jefferson, Latrobe was able to sur- 
vive the onslaughts of Thornton, by which his 
predecessors, Hallet and Hadfield, had been 
borne under, and to establish the first profes- 
sional office of an architect in the United States, 
with a wide practise. His pupils Robert Mills 
and William Strickland carried on his tradition, 
which dominated American architecture to the 
middle of the nineteenth century. 

Already by its second decade Greek enthusi- | 
asm was at a high pitch. Nicholas Biddle, who 
in his precocious youth had selected the casts 
from the Musée Napoleon for the Pennsylvania 


[97] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


Academy of the Fine Arts, and had undertaken 
the journey to Greece, was the arbiter of taste. 
For his magazine, the Port-Folio, George 
Tucker, one of Jefferson’s protégés, wrote urg- 
ing a veritable revival of Greek architecture. 

When the second Bank of the United States 
undertook its new banking house in Philadelphia 
the advertisement for plans stated that “the 
Directors are desirous of exhibiting a chaste 
imitation of Grecian architecture, in its simplest 
form.” Latrobe, in his design, took the final step 
of reproducing the Parthenon, with two fronts 
of eight Greek Dorie columns. Strickland 
and others also gave Greek designs, and it was 
to Strickland that the execution, closely follow- 
ing Latrobe’s plans, ultimately fell after his 
master’s departure and death. 

In the day of its building the Bank attracted 
an attention which was international. Bernhard 
of Saxe-Weimar wrote in 1825: “It is the most 
beautiful building I have yet seen in the United 
States.” The highest praise is that of a cor- 
respondent of the London Morning Chronicle, 
in the ’thirties, who writes that the building “ex- 
cells in elegance and equals in utility, the edifice, 


[98] 


THE GREEK REVIVAL 


not only of the Bank of England, but of any 
banking house in the world.” 

These estimates were dependent on the uni- 
versal success of the Greek revival, which else- 
where ultimately reached the same goal. In 
Great Britain the form of the Parthenon had 
been adopted for the National Monument at 
Edinburgh. In Germany it had been embodied 
in the Walhalla at Regensburg. These, how- 
ever, were monuments simply. It scarcely oc- 
curred to architects abroad to follow the great 
Athenian model in a building devoted to prac- 
tical uses. The Bank of the United States not 
only anticipates the foreign versions of the 
Parthenon by a decade but represents an ex- 
treme of classicism unparalleled abroad. The 
form of the temple was established as a single 
unconditional ideal for all classes of buildings. 

For the Connecticut capitol at New Haven, 
Ithiel Town built a model of the Theseum; for 
the Kentucky capitol at Frankfort it was an 
Ionic temple which was preferred. New York, 
too, had to have its Parthenon, the old Custom 
House, now the Sub-Treasury, built by Town 
and Alexander Jackson Davis. The banks of 


[99] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


Wall Street of the ’thirties might well suggest 
the row of treasuries at Olympia. For Girard 
College in Philadelphia, Biddle overrode the op- 
position of the architect, Thomas U. Walter, to 
force the adoption of the temple form executed 
with a vast Greek Corinthian order. 

Where the full scheme of the temple was not 
adopted at least there was a great colonnade, as 
in Mills’ facade of the Treasury in Washington, 
Town’s, in the Merchants’ Exchange in New a 
York, and in Walter’s wings of the national 
Capitol. Strickland carried a circular peristyle 
about the front of the Exchange in Philadelphia, 
and placed the Monument of Lysicrates, as a 
convenient cupola, on top. | 

The commemorative monuments also took 
their forms from antiquity. In the competition 
for the Washington Monument in Baltimore, 
Ramée proposed a triumphal arch, Mills, a vast 
Greek column. Greece and the column carried 
off the palm. The design of the monument, 
powerful and utterly simple, anticipates those 
of the Wellington monuments in London and 
Dublin, and has set the example for many others. — 
For the monument at Bunker Hill an obelisk 

[100] 


Photograph by James F. Hughes 


THe Greek CoLuMN / 


The Washington Monument in Baltimore 


VIVMETIG. 3} WO eISNTepuy 


asooy] Wsaug AH, 


a0nn9M “gT Any fq ydvsbo0yg 


pescerne cy napa Nas snag ee 


THE GREEK REVIVAL 


was preferred, and this was the type with which 
Mills won the competition for the Washington 
Monument in the national capital, completed 
only after the Civil War. In its day it was the 
tallest of man-made structures. Before its com- 
pletion all extraneous appendages had been 
eliminated. The character of classic architec- 
ture and the character of Washington are well 
matched in its noble simplicity and quiet 
grandeur. 

The first church to show the classic inspiration 
was Latrobe’s Catholic Cathedral in Baltimore 
for the diocese of the United States, begun after 
the opening of the century. Here a Roman 
scheme was adopted, with simple granite walls, a 
low masonry dome over the crossing, a great 
portico at the west. The interior had a new 
richness in composition of interior space, a new 
majesty. Even to-day, a century after its build- 
ing, the Cathedral remains the finest classical 
church in the country. 

For Saint John’s, the Episcopal church in 
Washington, Latrobe chose the scheme of the 
Greek cross with equal arms, now disguised by 
later additions. To his pupil Mills, fell the task 

[101] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


of adapting the classic forms to the requirements 
of the newer evangelical sects. For the audito- 
rium which their emphasis on the sermon re- 
quired he used a great domed rotunda, circular or 
octagonal. Of all his churches of this type there 
remains only the Monumental Church in Rich- 
mond, in which he used the Egyptian details first 
popularized by Napoleon’s eastern campaign. 
Considerations of use were ultimately thrust 
aside in the church, also, by visions of the temple. 
Jefferson built one, Roman in suggestion, for 
Christ Church in Charlottesville. For the 
French chapel in New York, Davis followed the 
Tonic temple on the Illissus. In St. Paul's 
Church in Boston and in many others the simple 
severity of the temple was also preferred, the 
Christian purpose revealed only by the Cross. 
The dwelling was the last to yield to the ruling 
Greek mania, but yield it did, and the triumph 
of the classic was universal. Critics who have 
felt that the passing of the Colonial marked the 
end of healthy development of traditional art as 
an outgrowth of contemporary culture, and that 
the classic revival was an exotic with no firm root 
in American civilization forget that the men of 
[102] 


THE GREEK REVIVAL 


the ’twenties and ’thirties had a consciousness of 
solidarity with ancient Greece which reached 
every department of life. Their enthusiasm 
was fanned into flame by the Greek war of 
independence. There was even the demand for 
military intervention. A Congressman from 
western New York declared he could furnish, 
from his sparsely settled region, “five hundred 
men, six feet high, with sinewy arms and case- 
hardened constitutions, bold spirits and daring 
adventurers, who would march on a bushel of 
corn and a gallon of whisky per man from the 
extreme part of the world to Constantinople.” 
Jefferson’s Roman temples for his professors, 
realizing his dream of a generation before, had 
been the first of the temple houses. Hadfield 
translated one into Greek at Arlington, the home 
of Washington’s adopted son, whose daughter 
was later to bring it to her husband, the com- 
mander of the Confederate armies, Robert E. 
Lee. Hadfield used a front of six Doric columns 
of enormous massiveness, following those of the 
great temple at Paestum. Disproportionate as 
it seems from near at hand, no other house than 
Arlington could carry so well across the 
[103] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


Potomac, no other so well hold its own at the 
other end of a composition with the Capitol. 

The extreme step in the imitation of the 
temple, the placing of columns all about instead 
of merely in front, was taken by Biddle in en- 
larging his house, Andalusia, on the Delaware 
in 1834. He followed the Theseum at Athens 
which he had seen and admired in his youth. It 
remained only to model a house on the Par- 
thenon, with its front of eight columns instead 
of six. This was done by James Coles Bruce at 
his Virginia plantation, Berry Hill. Bruce had 
stayed in Philadelphia just before inheriting the 
estate, and was influenced by Andalusia in his 
choice of atype. On either side of its great lawn 
are the office and schoolhouse, each likewise in 
the form of a Greek Doric temple. Nowhere 
else, perhaps, is the ante-bellum plantation to be 
found in equal magnificence. 

South and North, East and West, such ex- 
amples were followed in houses large and small. 
Whenever towns and regions prospered in the 
thirties and forties, the white porticoes were to 
be found, fronting or surrounding the houses. 
In the academic shades of Cambridge, of Athens 

[104] 


* as all 
ee ee 
(nal aan el ey 


THE GREEK REVIVAL 


in Georgia—significant by its very name—in the 
whaling ports of Nantucket and New Bedford, 
in the blue grass of Kentucky, they flourished 
alike. In New York, Colonnade Row on 
Lafayette Street sheltered Fenimore Cooper, 
Philip Hone, and Washington Irving. Along 
the Gulf it was particularly common to have the 
columns surrounding the house, with balconies 
between, suitable to the climate. 

In the backwoods states beyond the Alleghe- 
nies and the Ohio the imitation of the temple 
was even more universal than on the seaboard. 
When the wave of Eastern emigration of the 
thirties swept out along the newly opened Erie 
Canal and across the lakes it brought with it the 
classic ideal. The names of towns—Rome and 
Syracuse and Troy in western New York; Ypsi- 
lanti and Byron, Ionia and Scio in Michigan— 
recall classic sites, or personalities and places in 
the Greek struggle for freedom. Many a little 
old township in the Northwest has no house 
which does not conform to the ruling taste, yet 
such were the possible variations that no two are 
alike. Square piers might be substituted for the 
round columns, Greek moldings suggested with 

[105] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


astonishing success by the simplifications of the 


carpenter. 

With forms so thoroughly established, owners 
were able to proceed with no other assistance 
than that of the builders. The few professional 
architects of the time, mostly in the eastern 
centers, generally refused to abdicate their 
creative liberty to the temple scheme in dwelling- 
houses, so that it represents a genuinely popular 
preference of laymen and amateurs. 

Along with the rectangular temple, the 
passion for unity of form brought the centralized 
scheme,—square, octagonal or circular,—de- 
scendant of the villa rotonda. Latrobe employed 
this for his Center House of the Philadelphia 
Water Works, a dome sheltering the tank. Jef- 


ferson, who had three times proposed Palladio’s © 


model for others without success, finally built for 
his own retreat at Poplar Forest a house which 
was a perfect octagon. Years later Orson Squire 
Fowler built another on the Hudson, and by his 
publications spread the idea widely. In the 
fifties octagonal houses were scattered every- 
where. Even the ultimate step of building the 
house in the form of a circle—long imagined by 

[106] : 


Fig eee 
iy Sia ean 
wee Fe 


THE GREEK REVIVAL 


enthusiasts—was finally taken. The victory of 
the formal ideal was complete. 

Jefferson’s dream thus came true—to estab- 
lish the classic as a national style. While it had 
triumphed in every country, in the older nations 
of Europe, with firmly established traditions, its 
success had been tempered by conservatism and 
common sense. Only on the outskirts of 
European civilization, in Scotland, in Russia, in 
America was enthusiasm sophomoric enough to 
carry through the full classic program. Only in 
America was it pushed to its extreme conse- 
quences. The attempt can not be judged merely 
from our present standpoint. In 1800 it was not 
banal, but original, to copy the Greeks. What- 
ever we think of the work of the revivalists, we 
must recognize that they endowed America with 
an architectural tradition unsurpassed in dignity 
and monumental quality. Whether we like it or 
not we must recognize it as one of the distinctive 
American contributions to style. It furnished 
the basis for the ingrained love of the simple, 
austere, refined and chastened in architecture 
which underlies the spirit of our creative work 
to-day. 

[107] 


rs 


tf 


CHAPTER IX 


ROMANTICISM AND THE GOTHIC 


LikE all artistic creations, the classic edifice, 
in the moment of its highest splendor, was being 
undermined by the work of a new generation. 
The classicists were followed by the romantics. 

Although romanticism with its glorification of 
the individual was rooted in the very essence of 
American democracy, the first stimulus came 
from abroad, especially from England, where 
the romantic movement had long been gathering 
strength. ‘The modern appreciation of land- 
scape had begun early in the eighteenth century. 
Kent “leaped the fence and saw that all nature 
was a garden.” England and Germany awak- 
ened to their northern national heritage: the 
mythology and legend, the history and art of the 
Middle Ages. Walpole wrote his Castle of 
Otranto and built his Gothic villa, Strawberry 
Hill. Although the full fruits of the seed were 
not garnered until after 1800, with the genera- 

[111] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


tion of Byron and Scott and Hugo, of Constable 
and Delacroix, there began already an increasing 
harvest. To the romantic enthusiasts, pictur- 
esqueness and naturalness, nationality and relig- 


ion, all seemed embodied not in classic architec- 


ture, but in the Gothic. 

Even in America where classic influence was 
so strong there was soon a romantic undercur- 
rent. Jefferson, whose choice of a mountaintop 


as the site for his classic house was itself a 


romantic act, brought in the English landscape 
garden. Side by side with the first calm Greek 
monuments rose others, few at first, which took 
their inspiration from the Middle Ages. 

Even before the Revolution Jefferson had pro- 
posed a Gothic garden temple. Latrobe gave 
the cathedral builders in Baltimore an alterna- 
tive Gothic design, in which he came quite 
abreast of the best English knowledge of the 
style at that time. In a Philadelphia country- 
seat, Sedgeley, he made, just before the eight- 
eenth century closed, the first American at- 
tempt to revive the Gothic mansion. Its little 
lodge still stands, though modified out of recog- 
nition. Godefroi, a French refugee in Balti- 

[112] 


mt 062 la 
(ape ie i pe 
AN te 
Lf ae 


ROMANTICISM AND THE GOTHIC 


more, built for the Sulpicians the Chapel of 
St. Mary, with Gothic forms but poorly under- 
stood. It was the first church of the Gothic 
revival in America. 

Latrobe, Mills and Strickland all indulged in 
Gothic exercises as an occasional relief from the 
classic. Latrobe’s Bank of Philadelphia, vaulted 
throughout in masonry, was the earliest and 
worthiest of these buildings. It has long been 
swept away, as have the first gimcrack churches 
and Masonic temples of Strickland and his con- 
temporaries in Philadelphia and New York. As 
time went on others gained a firmer grasp of the 
style and established it in the far South at 
Charleston and at Savannah. At Milledgeville, 
the old capital of Georgia, the state buildings 
were made Gothic in the ’thirties. Alexander 
Jackson Davis, another devotee of the classic for 
public buildings, likewise took up Gothic forms. 
He used them for the old New York University 
building on Washington Square, and built a 
great Gothic country-seat for Robert Gilmor of 
Baltimore, a pioneer collector of old masters. 
Washington Irving, in remodeling Sunnyside, 
his house at Tarrytown, gave the romantic 

[113] 


Le 2 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


movement a new impetus. Robert Dale Owen, 
before building the Smithsonian Institution in 
Washington, reached the conclusion, by an 
elaborate train of reasoning, that the Roman- 
esque phase of medieval art was best suited to 
be a national style. The structure, erected from 


the designs of James Renwick, had a picturesque 


grouping of towers. 

On the seaboard by the end of the ‘thintigs peo- 
ple began to tire of the endless repetition of the 
temple house. Rational and satiric literary on- 
slaughts against it were made by Cooper and 
others. The “English cottage style’ was cham- 
pioned by Andrew Jackson Downing, the first 
American to make a profession of landscape 
gardening. Davis joined with him in publish- 
ing books which gave numerous models. The 
cottages of wood and stucco, with steep roofs, 
traceried eaves and latticed windows, multiplied 
rapidly in the North, while in the South some 
of the finest plantation houses were now Gothic. 
Davis built Belmead, above Richmond, on the 
lines of a famous English house, Kast Barsham. 
Staunton Hill, one of the two great Bruce 


eae opposed its Gothic gables and 


[114] 


ROMANTICISM AND THE GOTHIC 


porches to the Greek porticoes of the other, 
Berry Hill. 

Meanwhile in England, Pugin was beginning 
to preach a revival of “Christian architecture” 
with a new fervor, and to practise it with a new 
knowledge. At least for churches, the Gothic 
forms were now felt to be more appropriate. 
Trinity Church in New York, which had never 
abandoned the old tradition of Gothic, entrusted 
its architectural fortunes in 1839 to Richard 
Upjohn, a newcomer from England. He built 
the church still standing at the head of Wall 
Street, in honest materials, with competent 
familiarity with the rich forms of English 
Gothic. Renwick likewise displayed an accom- 
plished mastery of Gothic structure and disposi- 
tions in Grace Church and St. Patrick’s Ca- 
thedral in New York. 

More solid and more simple than these 
churches were buildings of another class for 
which the military architecture of the Middle 
Ages suggested a Gothic form. These were the 
prisons, to which the reformers of the ’thirties 
gave great attention. The improvement of the 
horrible conditions prevailing in prisons of an 

[115] 


ra) 


ies 
eles 
ee oes a 


principle of solitary confinement, hile a 
adopted a decade later by Latrobe in the Pen n 

tentiary at Richmond. At the same time 
Mangin designed a prison for New Yous 


onan iHeen of medieval forms. 


[116] 


xX 


A CONFUSION OF TONGUES 


CHAPTER X 


A CONFUSION OF TONGUES 


THE choice between classic and Gothic, which 
Latrobe first offered to the Cathedral trustees, 
rapidly widened to include other styles. The 
struggle between them did not issue, as it had in 
earlier centuries, with the victory of either one, 
but both continued, subdivided further, and re- 
ceived the addition of many more. The reason, 
here as abroad, lay in the growth of historical 
knowledge, one of the most characteristic pro- 
ducts of the nineteenth century, which for the 
first time made the forms of many styles familiar 
to a single generation. The historical spirit had 
already contributed largely to the growth of 
classicism and romanticism, and to their division 
into Roman and Greek, Gothic and Romanesque 
phases. To these were now added styles un- 
connected with the classic and romantic pro- 
grams. Soon there was created among designers 
the conscious principle of complete freedom of 

[119] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


choice between the various historical styles. A 
given style was adopted on grounds of personal 
preference or supposed suitability to the problem 
in hand. The “Battle of the Styles” was on. 

At first the field of choice was wide, and the 
contestants were informed with little knowledge 
of many of the styles they championed, Even 
the “Italian villas” would scarcely have been 
recognized in Italy. The “chalets” and “Moor- 
ish cottages,” however, and such phantasms as 
Barnum’s house, Iranistan, at Bridgeport, were, 
after all, exceptions. More pervasive was the 
French influence of the Second Empire. The 
French architect Lemoulnier brought the style 
to Boston in the middle of the century. Made 
popular by the completion of the Louvre and the 
Hotel de Ville, it was taken up officially, horribly 
brutalized, in a multitude of government offices 
and public buildings after the Civil War, such as 
the State Department in Washington, the old 
Post Offices of New York, Philadelphia, and 
Boston. In dwellings the mansard roof covered 
the land. | 

Less serious than the mere variety of style, 
which here, as in Europe, left the craftsman un- 

[120] 


A CONFUSION OF TONGUES 


sustained by solid traditions of form, was the 
vulgarization of all styles in the bourgeois 
democracy of the growing towns. Never in the 
world had means been more diffused than in the 
North after the Civil War. Never had there 
been so raw a society as that which sprang up in 
the newer western regions. The democracy of 
Old Hickory and of the first settlement of the 
Northwest had at least acknowledged the gods 
of the classic Olympus. In the crude towns of 
the gold rush and of the boomers the only guides 
were whim and ostentation. The parvenus of 
the East had none better. The American indi- 
vidualism which demanded a house different 
from that of one’s neighbor was unrestrained by 
the taste of a settled aristocracy, the tenacity of 
peasants, or the impotence of a herded pro- 
letariat. 

What have been called the “Dark Ages” of 
American architecture have indeed often been 
painted blacker than they were. There was no 
time when good work was not being done. The 
last of the old leaders and traditions survived to 
overlap with the new. Each of the passing move- 
ments produced certain works which have merit 

[121] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


and value. What was unique in degree perhaps, 
as compared with Europe at the same time or 
with America before or since, was the relative 
submergence of these leaders ‘and these works in 
the mass of vulgarity. The leaders were still 
few, the mass, greater than ever before, still un- 
leavened. 

The machine was then a new toy, every fresh 
triumph of which was eagerly acclaimed. The 
power scroll-saw was quickly seized on as offer- 
ing a substitute for tracery and carving. Its 
fantastic brackets supported the wide eaves of 
the Victorian house, its curves filled the panels. 
The casting of iron made the duplication of 
molded detail easy. At first used frankly in 
light balconies and railings, it was later sanded 
and painted in imitation of stone, for the multi- 
plication of the orders over the fronts of ware- 
houses and shops, and even for the great dome 


added to the enlarged Capitol in Washington. 


In brickmaking and bricklaying mechanical per- 

fection of shape, uniformity of color, smoothness 

of surface and fineness of jointing became the 

ruling ideas. The technical ability to make glass 

in large sheets was turned to account in houses 
[122] 


A CONFUSION OF TONGUES 


as well as in shops, with an avidity which did 
not discriminate between public display and 
domestic intimacy. 

The prevailing confusion was increased by the 
vast new influx of immigrants from Europe. 
They flocked into the lands opened by the Pacific 
railways, and to the factories flourishing behind 
tariff barriers and eager for foreign labor not yet 
accustomed to the American standard of means 
and comfort. Among the Germans who fled 
from the repressions of ’forty-eight or the aggres- 
sive Prussian policy of the ’sixties were many men 
of technical capacity, to whom fell much of the 
work of the decade following the Civil War. In 
Germany itself, however, taste was then at an 
ebb. ‘The forms of the florid northern Renais- 
sance which these men imported, and which 
burgeoned in the street architecture of the 
seventies, added to the rank disorder. 

In the midst of a like wilderness in Victorian 
England, the voice of Ruskin was raised in praise 
of an other-worldliness which would restore 
sacrifice to religion, truth to construction. Re- 
coiling from the materialism and industrialism 
of the time, he could see salvation only in a pious 

[123] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


return to the spirit of the Middle Ages, which 
he found embodied only in its own forms. Thus 
the Gothic received a new impetus. His identifi- 
cation of artistic merit with moral qualities— 
“truth” of structure, nobility of material, and 
human devotion as expressed in lavish adornment 
by carving and color, led his admiration to the 
southern, Italian work, and this became the chief 
ingredient of the later Victorian Gothic. Amer- 
ican adherents were many. The churches were 
not the only buildings to feel their hands, which 
were exercised even on the very temples of 
materialism—the banks. Such institutions of 
taste as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine 
Arts, the National Academy of Design in New 
York, and the newly founded Boston Museum 
of Fine Arts all housed themselves, in the 
’seventies, in palaces of a doubtful Gothic, sup- 
posedly Italian, with pointed arches of vari- 
colored stones. Memorial Hall at Harvard re- 
mains as the most ambitious and important 


monument of the style. 


There were not lacking men who dared to . 


laugh at “consistency of style” and to combine 
elements from many styles to create a hybrid, 
[124] | 


A CONFUSION OF TONGUES 


personal means of expression. Frank Furness 
of Philadelphia—in spite of his Academy—was 
one of these, whose buildings, now thought of 
more as aberrations, had the power to fire the 
youthful enthusiasm of a later apostle of indi- 
viduality, Louis Sullivan. 

Into the welter of prejudice, ignorance and 
wilfulness came a new generation of architects 
trained abroad in the great Paris school, the 
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which the empire of 
Napoleon III had given a fresh prestige. The 
first to make his influence felt was Henry Hob- 
son Richardson, a Southerner, whom the outcome 
of the war sent north to the rarefied Boston of 
Emerson and Ruskin. Personally of enormous 
vigor, Richardson was not at home in the 
fashionable Victorian Gothic of his first essays. 
In Trinity Church he turned to the cruder and 
more elemental Romanesque of southern France 
and Spain, in which, as he went on, he discerned 
a suitability to American conditions and environ- 
ment. ‘Towers and broad low arches in pictur- 
esque array were mantled with the rugged 
stonework of Auvergne. Painters, carvers and 
craftsmen, enlisted with a new enthusiasm, 

[125] 


worked side by side in the decorwan | 
ae ah jails, idee ssi ole 


image of what they thought architecture i in 
att ought’ to be. 


son to the Beaux-Arts. On his first teen 
Seas peters the war he had establish a 
generation were trained. He had, however. 
gone back to France, and it was after 187 0 whe 
he came again to America and began to gi | 


racies. Hunt, forceful and unintimidate 
his clients, established the style of their towr 
[126] Ke 


viydjepepiyg ‘Aivus}usg Useyseyy vuJ, 
TVAIAMY OLNLOD AXIUVET THY, 


Unasnyy piuvajisuuag ay}, fo fisazimop 


QLOW} [IG] —SAONAISININAY ALATIY) 


psovay JwInzoanyory Ud fo fisajinop 


Bist h. kieae « 


A CONFUSION OF TONGUES 


country palaces, drawing his suggestions from 
the chateaux of the Valois. The great mansions 
of Fifth Avenue took their type from his houses 
for William K. Vanderbilt, for John Jacob 
Astor, for Commodore Gerry; the Newport 
“cottages,” from his “Ochre Court,” “The 
Breakers,” and “Marble House.” 

The finest, perhaps, was the first-named, al- 
ready within two generations a prey of the 
wrecker, like most of the other great town 
houses of that era. Still romantic, high roofed, 
turreted, and many chimneyed, it offered its rich 
facades and vast monumental rooms as a back- 
ground for the exotic pageantry of America’s 
first gilded age. 

More splendid still was Biltmore, the Vander- 
bilt chateau in North Carolina, where Hunt 
strove to create for his clients an illusion truly 
feudal. Blois itself was pillaged for the idea 
of the great staircase. Accomplished detail and 
fine masonry made the pastiche no unworthy one. 
For the decoration Hunt gathered around him a 
group of artists who worked with an enthusiasm 
of emulation in what they felt to be a true artistic 
Renaissance. 

Meanwhile, in the minor house architecture, a 

[127 ] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


new force was making itself felt—the English 
“Queen Anne.” William Morris, the father of 
the revival of handicraft in the Arts and Crafts 
movement, in his “Red House” on Bexley Heath 
had started a return to the homely domestic 
building of brick in the days of Anne, when 
medieval and classic motives were still freely 
mingled. Half-timber, clustered chimneys, 
rough-cast gables, barred casements, and molded 
sheathing—favorite motives with English de- 
signers of the school, like Norman Shaw—ap- 
peared in America with the English building at 
the Centennial Exposition. At first they were 


borrowed with little thought, as in the houses by 


a host of imitators of Shaw and Eastlake, or the 
fashionable casinos at Newport and Short Hills 
by the new firm of McKim, Mead and White. 


These men, however, had grasped the deeper 


implications of the movement, which involved 
not the copying of current English idioms but 
the study of local characteristics and materials in 
the early American vernacular. The three men, 
even before they formed their partnership, took, 
in company with Bigelow, what they came 
afterward to call their “famous trip” along the 
[128] 


A CONFUSION OF TONGUES 


New England coast, in the Centennial year. 
They saw the old houses of Salem and Ports- 
mouth, the fragments assembled at Indian Hill 
by the pioneer collector, Ben Perley Poore. On 
their return they launched a Colonial revival, 
which, fantastic at first in its mixture and over- 
loading of detail, gradually gained adherents, 
knowledge and strength. ‘The old materials, the 
“Harvard brick” of New England, the ledge- 
stone of Pennsylvania were taken up and given 
once more a sympathetic handling. 

In Florida, John Carrére and Thomas Hast- 
ings, just back from their training abroad, 
inaugurated a return to the local Spanish tradi- 
tions in their great hotels, their church and 
houses there. 

In Philadelphia two young men, Walter Cope 
and John Stewardson, early cut off by death, 
adopted English collegiate models—Tudor or 
Elizabethan—at Bryn Mawr, at Princeton, at 
Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Their loving study 
of simple textures was to be perpetuated with 
richer forms by a whole school—Eyre and Day 
and Klauder and their successors—and was 
ultimately, with the complete adoption of the 

[129] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


style by Princeton and Yale, to have a wide in- 
fluence in American universities, as well as in 
domestic building. 

The romantic strain, so strong in Richardson, 
lived on in the Gothic of Bertram Goodhue and 
of his erstwhile partner Ralph Adams Cram. 
The early Gothic revivalists, as well as the first 
followers of Ruskin, had mastered the forms 
rather than the spirit of the Middle Ages. 
Meanwhile Morris had taught his lesson, Sed- 
ding and Bodley in England had worked more 
freely in their chosen style, with greater sym- 
pathy for materials and craftsmanship. These 
qualities now appeared in the American Gothic. 

Cram was a fervent literary disciple of Rus- 
kin, Morris and the leaders of the Oxford move-~ 
ment; Goodhue was a winsome youth who had 
read Goethe almost in the nursery and at fifteen 
had blazoned on his wall the motto: “Art pre- 
exists in Nature, and Nature is reproduced in 
Art.” He had absorbed Gothic forms in Ren- 
wick’s office. They flowed magically from his 
gifted pen which created marvelous dream cities 
of Germany, of medieval Italy, of Persia. To- 
gether the young knights-errant went forth lance 

[130] 


A CONFUSION OF TONGUES 


in hand, to tilt against the powers of industrial- 
ism, to rescue piety and craftsmanship. 

Their first success was won in alliance with 
the High Churchmen. They took up the ritual 
arrangements and the traditional forms of the 
English church as they had been cut off by 
Henry VIII. All Saints’ at Ashmont, their 
earliest triumph, built in 1892, shows a free use 
of this last phase of Gothic, with walls of brown- 
seamed granite, and windows of rich glass, 
heavily leaded. In their later churches they were 
to range more widely within the styles of the 
Middle Ages, from the Early English of Cram’s 
Calvary Church in Pittsburgh to the Byzantine 
of Goodhue’s St. Bartholomew in New York. 
At West Point the craggy site of the Military 
Academy suggested a castellated treatment with 
a superbly rugged chapel. Although for years 
Goodhue shunned Italy for fear of exposing 
himself to the spell of the classic, he did not dis- 
dain to work occasionally with classic forms, and 
achieved notable success with them in his Cali- 
fornia houses. In Cuba and California, too, he 
was to work in the lavish Spanish Colonial style 
with fine imaginative effect. 

[131] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


As time went on Goodhue’s Gothic was to be- 
come less and less a matter of archeology. The 
English work of Sir Gilbert Scott turned him in 
a freer direction. St. Vincent Ferrer in New 
York already shows the influence of Scott's 
Liverpool Cathedral. After Goodhue’s first 
sight of Liverpool, he redesigned completely his 
proposed cathedral in Baltimore, with bolder 
scale and less traditional details. This was but 
the first step in a development which was to carry 
him away from historical forms, into a struggle 
for freedom of expression, the story of which be- 


longs to a later chapter. 


F132] 


XI 


THE STAGE OF MODERNISM: 
NEW MATERIALS AND NEW TYPES 


x 
tH ~ e 
+ 
= 
i i 
' 
} 
\ 
5 


CHAPTER XI 


THE STAGE OF MODERNISM: 
NEW MATERIALS AND NEW TYPES 


Unt late in the nineteenth century architects 
had worked primarily with the traditional ma- 
terials, wood, stone and brick, and at the con- 
ventional problems of the house, the church, the 
college, the civic building, at most the theater 
and the bank. Meanwhile modern industrial 
civilization was coming both to furnish them with 
new materials of revolutionary properties, and to 
present them with problems in the creation of 
new types of buildings for industry, transporta- 
tion and commerce. Iron and steel, concrete 
reinforced with steel, were of a strength hitherto 
unknown in building. The stations and bridges 
called into being by the railways, the vast 
factories which ease of communication en- 
couraged, the offices for business thus built up 
have little precedent in earlier epochs and are the 
characteristic structures of our time. 

[135] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


The industrial revolution, with its division of 
labor and application of power machinery, had 
begun in England in the later eighteenth 
century, and had soon adopted the steam engine, 
its first great servant. Dependence on English 
goods had led Hamilton, as one of the first cares 
of the new state, to encourage American manu- 
factures. L’Enfant laid out for him a grandiose 
plan for the new industrial town of Paterson at 
the falls of the Passaic; Latrobe designed for 
the Philadelphia Water Works the first steam 
engine in America. Fulton with his steamboat 
solved the problem of communication by water 
on the great rivers and lakes, as well as ulti- 
mately on the ocean. The steam railroad, in- 
vented in England, found its chief use in the 
vast areas of the United States. In the wake of 
industrialism came the capitalistic organization 
of society, with its great cities, its vast accumula- 
tions of wealth, its laboring masses, its 
imperialistic exploitation of backward regions. 

Although factory towns using the power of 
the rivers had appeared in New England soon 
after 1800, the country remained overwhelm- 
ingly agricultural until the Civil War. ‘Trans- 

[136] 


Se 
. 


THE STAGE OF MODERNISM 


portation and commerce dealt more with the ex- 
port of raw materials and agricultural products, 
the import of finer manufactured goods. The 
stimulus to manufacture given by the war was 
perpetuated by the high tariff imposed to pay 
the debt and to insure the rich American market 
to American factories. The vast unoccupied 
lands invited the monopolizing of natural re- 
sources; the absence of legal restraints on inter- 
nal trade promoted combinations on.a grand 
scale. New technical inventions—the type- 
writer, the sewing machine—stimulated by the 
scarcity and cost of labor, were exploited at home 
and abroad. 

The natural wealth of open land and the 
democracy which it had evoked kept the pros- 
perity of the many on a high level. The “Amer- 
ican System” came into being. It involved not 
so much the grinding down of the masses to pro- 
duce goods cheaply for sale abroad, as the 
development of their own capacity to buy more 
and more material luxuries. The demand was 
created by democratic passion for equality of 
standards and by the vast development of ad- 
vertising among a population enabled to read by 

[137] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


universal free education. Thus quantity pro- 
duction could be developed on an unexampled 
scale, in the midst of a bourgeois prosperity 
never before approached. The consequences 
were felt not least in building, which has become 
one of the greatest of industries in the United 
States. 

Of the new materials, iron was the first to find 
extensive application, in trusses over assembly 
halls and concourses of unprecedented width, 
and bridges of wide span. Cast mto columns, 
iron permitted a new slenderness of interior sup- 
ports. 

The international expositions, beginning with 
the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, had given 
a great stimulus to the use of large areas of glass, 
which the development of plate glass arose to 
satisfy. The shops, the vast department-stores, 
became so many show-cases of which the walls 
tended to disappear, the exterior points of sup- 
port to be as few and far apart as possible. The 
skylight, on the other hand, enabled museums 
and exhibition buildings to be made without 
openings in their walls, with great courts roofed 
with glass and iron. These new possibilities, like 

[138] | 


THE STAGE OF MODERNISM 


all new resources, were exploited at first without 
appreciation of their corresponding drawbacks. 

With the development of new processes, steel 
succeeded wrought and cast iron in construction. 
Rolled into beams of form mathematically de- 
vised to give the greatest resistance to bending, 
it permitted level floor spans to have greater 
width than ever before. In the ’eighties such 
rolled beams were imported and still precious. 
In channels, angles and plates steel could be 
riveted together in a rigid frame of unpre- 
cedented strength. 

At first the supposition was that metal, being 
noncombustible, was proof against fire, but steel 


- was soon found to twist and bend in fire with 


disastrous results. It proved necessary to case 
the metal in fireproofing, preferably brick or 
terra cotta which had been through fire in its 
very making. The impulse to the arts of fire and 
clay was great. Not only structural terra cotta, 
but glazed faience of white and of the greatest 
variety of colors became available. Pressed in 
molds, it permitted a multiplication of ornament 
that was to be far from an unmixed blessing. 
Latest of the new materials to receive wide 
[139] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


application was concrete. The Romans, with 
their remarkable volcanic cement, had developed 
a system of massive concrete construction well 
adapted to their imperial requirements and their 
vast bodies of unskilled laborers. A modern 
equivalent waited on the discovery of an equally 
good binding material. It was found in Port- 
land cement, the use of which increased rapidly 
in the last years of the nineteenth century and 
the first of the twentieth. For the superstruc- 
ture of buildings modern science and economy 
provided a substitute for the enormous massive- 
ness of Roman concrete. This was the system of 
reinforcing with iron or steel, first devised in 
France by Joseph Monier in the ’sixties, A 
composite structure was thus achieved, strong 
against both compression and tension, with the 
steel protected against both rust and fire. 
Equally novel in relation to past civilizations 
were some of the classes of buildings now raised 
to importance. The railway-station took the 
place of the old city gate as the point of arrival 
and departure. In the first stations, in America 
as in England, the fundamental form was the 
train shed, which, with the multiplication of 
[140] 


THE STAGE OF MODERNISM 


tracks and the use of iron arches of great span, 
acquired a certain beauty—lost, however, in 
smoke and grime. The development of the “book- 
ing-hall,” the waiting-room or concourse, gave 
a more grateful element to emphasize. With the 
adoption of electric power and the disappearance 
of the tracks below ground, it became the 
principal feature, filled with a flowing multitude. 

The factory early assumed its fundamental 
forms—the storied mill for multiplied uniform 
looms or light machines, the long shed with its 
traveling crane for heavy manufacturing. When 
wood was still universal for the upper floors, the 
striving for security against fire developed a 
standardized mill construction, with heavy plank- 
ing on large transverse beams which brought a 
concentrated weight to the outer walls at short 
intervals. Economy of structure suggested the 
concentration of the supports, too, at these 
points. A range of piers, diminishing as they 
rose, was the natural resulting form, impressive 
by its uniformity and length. When concrete 
replaced brick and wood, the piers spaced them- 
selves more widely; conditions demanded an 
architectural treatment of novel character and 
proportion. 

[141] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


The sites of American cities on navigable 
rivers of a size which dwarfs the Thames and the 
Seine has made their great bridges of steel, high 
above the masts of ships, striking features in the 
urban picture. Although at first the work solely 
of engineers, they operated powerfully on the 
imagination of architects, as Louis Sullivan has 
testified, to encourage the use of the new material 
and stimulate an enfranchisement from tradi- 
tional constructive forms. 

In the old cities of Europe the heights of build- 
ings were officially limited. Karly American 
efforts in this direction were regarded as in- 
vasions of the property rights guaranteed by the 
federal constitution, and for a century there was 
no other restriction on height than the strength 
of materials and the willingness to climb stairs. 
When iron and the elevator came into use in the 
’seventies the limit of possibility was raised 
enormously. Instead of spreading, as in London 
and Paris and Vienna, buildings, unrestrained 
by the state, shot upward on the preferred sites. 
The rentals from many stories increased the 
value of the land, and, by a circular train of 
causes, forced neighbors to build higher and 

[142] 


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THE STAGE OF MODERNISM 


higher. The island site of Manhattan, often 
named as the determining factor, was not so in 
truth—the incomparable majority of its build- 
ings remained, and still remains, of three and 
four stories. The most striking early illustra- 
tion of the tendency, indeed, was not in New 
York but in Chicago, rebuilding on the vast plain 
after its great fire. 

In the struggle skyward of the first ‘“elevator- 
buildings,” it soon occurred to designers to sup- 
port the floors entirely on columns of iron, leav- 
ing the outer walls with only their own weight 
to carry. ‘Thus were created such buildings as 
that of the World in New York, with a height of 
three hundred and seventy-five feet. Here how- 
ever the self-supporting walls reached a thick- 
ness of nine feet, even of twenty or more at some 
points; the value of the lower stories was com- 
promised. At this moment the decisive step was 
taken of supporting the wall itself, as well as the 
floors, on the frame of metal, reducing the wall 
to a mere veneer or curtain. This was first taken 
by William Le Baron Jenney in parts of the 
Home Insurance Building in Chicago, designed 
in the year 1883 and built from 1884 to 1886. 

[143] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


The economy was vast, the last hindrance to 
ascent was swept away. William Holabird and 
Martin Roche, from Jenney’s office, used the 
same scheme throughout their Tacoma Building 
built in the two following years. These build- 
ings still had cast iron columns and wrought iron 
beams, but the conception of a continuous steel 
frame with riveted joints was already present, 
and the materials were soon available. The sky 
now became indeed the limit—the skyscraper 
was born. 

These were the economic and constructive de- 
velopments, of vast import and novelty, by which 
the stage was set for new creations in form. Not 
since the Gothic was invented had there been 
structures so revolutionary. What artistic ideals 
were to govern them; what character were they 
to take? Was man to be mastered by the giants 
of his creation, or to master them? The answer 
lay with leaders of the generation coming to 
maturity as the century drew toward its close. 


[144] 


XIT 


WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE? 


THE POLES OF MODERNISM: 
FUNCTION AND FORM 


CHAPTER XII 


WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE? 


THE POLES OF MODERNISM: 
FUNCTION AND FORM 


Two forces struggled for mastery among the 
men of the ’nineties. One took its impulse from 
science, the overwhelming power which had 
dominated the nineteenth century; the other, re- 
acting against science, worked to establish the 
independence of art. One exalted truth as the 
supreme principle, in art as in science; the other 
raised beauty again to independent being. One 
typified the loving surrender of man to nature; 
the other, his victory over nature. 

The doctrine of truth in art, of obedience to 
nature, is as old as the ancients. Many a dif- 
ferent generation has been able to interpret this 
as the guiding principle of its own artistic striv- 
ings. It was with Herder and Goethe that it 
took on the meaning it was to have in the nine- 
teenth century. From a model of ordered unity, 

[147] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


nature became the source of creative inspiration. 
The artist, filled with its spirit, in impressing 
form on his materials, accepts the needs and use, 
and gives characteristic beauty: 

. . bis in den kleinsten Theil notwendig 
schin wie Baume Gottes. 

The mid-nineteenth century lay under the 
spell of nature. To the romantic interest was 
added the scientific. The study of the earth, of 
plants and animals, culminating in the work of 
Darwin, gave a new significance to the idea of 
evolution, as the progressive adaptation of or- 
ganic form to function and _ environment. 
- Religion and art alike were influenced by the 
new concepts. Merit in painting was identified 
with minute “truth to nature”; beauty in archi- 
tecture, with truth to use and structure. Keats 


was the voice of his time when he said,“ Beauty — 


is truth, truth beauty.” 

Frank outward expression of the nature of 
buildings, of their internal arrangements, and of 
their construction had, indeed, been characteristic 
of many earlier styles. As a more conscious 
principle, purism in the use of structural 
elements—a rule of “reason” and “good sense’ — 

[148] 


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WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE 


had been increasing in French classic architec- 
ture since the seventeenth century. Even the 
Greek revivalists in America, who had masked so 
many uses and arrangements in the form of the 
temple, had been careful to limit the column to 
its original and typical use as an isolated support. 
At the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, there was indif- 
ference to structural suggestions, but the keenest 
striving to express arrangement and “character.” 

By the middle of the nineteenth century the 
demand for “truth” had become insistent. Pugin 
wrote: “There should be no features about a 
building which are not necessary for convenience, 


99 ¢¢ 


construction or propriety;” “all ornament should 
consist of enrichment of the essential construc- 
tion of the building.” Ruskin added a moral 
fervor of judgment, casting into outer darkness, 
as “unnatural and monstrous,” the styles of 
Rome and of the Renaissance which he found 
wanting in structural sincerity. On _ the 
Continent Viollet-le-Duc wrote: “There are two 
ways of expressing truth in architecture; it must 
fulfil with scrupulous exactness all the conditions 
imposed by necessity . . . employ materials 
with due regard for their qualities and capaci- 
[149] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE | 


ties.” Semper summed up all in the formula: 
“Every technical product a resultant of use and 
material.” 

Evolutionary theory was meanwhile under- 
mining the imitation of historic styles from 
another side. ‘The principle of national indi- 
viduality and organic development was applied 
in tracing the relation of the art of past schools 
to race, environment and time. ‘These ideas 
were fundamentally hostile to every “revival” of 
historical forms in the modern world. 

It was but gradually that they were followed 
to their extreme consequences. Pugin and Rus- 
kin and their American disciples still thought 
the way of salvation lay through the Gothic for 
which they claimed a superiority in truth of ex- 
pression. Viollet-le-Duc, in spite of his 
enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, came ulti- 
mately to deny “the propriety of imposing on 
our age any reproduction of antique or medieval 
forms.” Semper announced that “the solution 
of modern problems must be freely developed 
from the premises given by modernity.” He was 
himself, however, still content to do his work 
with historical elements; and Viollet-le-Duc’s at- 

[150] 


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WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE 


tempts to deduce new architectural forms from 
the sporadic employment of iron in construc- 
tion had little success. They were too purely 
cerebral, too little left. We must recognize, also, 
that the problems and materials currently 
offered to the designer in 1870 had not yet 
changed enough from those of previous centuries, 
or yet crystallized enough to give sufficient basis 
for a revolutionary change of forms. 

A. new continent, a new society, a new com- 
munity, was needed for the realization of 
“modernist” ideas. In America commercialism, 
industrial society, had developed unrestrained. 
Patriotic motives added the call for “Amer- 
ican style” to the more general demand for a 
“modern style.” 

In the ’seventies and early eighties, while the 
Kast sought to assimilate itself to cultivated 
Europe, the West gloried in the American 
“Innocence” exaggerated by Mark Twain. A 
conjunction especially favorable existed in 
Chicago. The great fire left a tabula rasa—all 
was to be made new. For once there was an 
opportunity for young men in that most difficult 
and responsible of arts, where the “younger 

[151] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


men” are usually past fifty. On the active and 
independent spirits who were attracted to the 
city, the ideas of Viollet-le-Duc and Semper 
made a deep impression. Van Brunt of Kansas 
City had translated Viollet’s Discourses; John 
Root published excerpts from Semper’s work. 
The Western Association of Architects was 
founded, with pronounced radical tendencies; a 
new journal, the Inland Architect, gave its 
sponsors a voice and an audience. There was a 
ferment of discussion, experiment and emula- 
tion. 

From the Chicago ferment had come the 
decisive structural invention, the steel frame 
carrying the walls as well as the floors. From 
it, too, before 1890, emerged three men: Daniel 
Burnham, John Root and Louis Sullivan. 

Burnham described himself when he once 
called another “a dreamer with his feet on the 
ground.” A mystic, alive to beauty and to 
nature, and with a gift of friendship, he was yet 
of fixed purpose and immense determination. 
Great in executive capacity, obsessed with the 
idea of bigness, of power, he was the architect 
who grasped the significance of American in- 

[152] 


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WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE 


dustrialism, with its vast growth, its organiza- 
tion, its division of labor. It was he who created 
the type of American architect’s office of to-day, 
with its delegation of responsibility to designers, 
structural and mechanical engineers, specifica- 
tion writers, superintendents and executives. It 
was he more than any other to whom the Ameri- 
can business building owes its amplitude, its 
internal clarity of arrangement. 

Root, his partner through the years of 
struggle, was the artist, the designer—magnetic, 
facile, finished, eager to shine, receptive, en- 
amored of the new. In the race skyward Burn- 
ham and Root were in the van; in the struggle 
for a new form of expression Root was the popu- 
lar standard-bearer. The decisive structural in- 
ventions, however, were not theirs; the inspired 
artistic creation was made by another. 

In Louis Sullivan, Chicago found its poet. 
Half French, half Irish, he had the analytical 
mind of a scientist, the soul of a dreamer and 
artist. Overflowing with romantic enthusiasm 
for nature, dazzled by the logical splendor of 
mathematics, fascinated by Taine and Darwin, 

[153] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


abased before the titanic creative power of 
Michelangelo, he had passed rapidly through the 
discipline of school and of the Beaux-Arts— 
assimilating, questioning, feeling. At seventeen 
enamored of Chicago, its energy, its wide 
horizons of lake and prairie; at twenty-five al- 
ready established in a position to build his air- 
castles; at thirty he was a, prophet to youth, in 
lyrical outbursts of rushing words, enveloping an 
authentic philosophy. 

Among the architects of our day, whose ex- 
pressed notions are apt to be fragments from 
inconsistent systems, his ideas had an intuitive 
harmony and value, under “the dominant, all- 
pervading thought that a spontaneous and vital 
art must come fresh from nature, and can only 
thus come.” The artist is “to arrest and typify 
in materials the harmonious and inter-blended 
rhythms of nature and humanity.” To him 
reason and analysis were not all. 

Sensitive, passionate and courageous, he 
illustrated in his own career that “to the master 
mind . . . imbued with the elemental signifi- 
cance of nature’s moods, humbled before the 
future and the past, art and its outworkings are 
largely tragic.” 

[154] 


WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE 


Sullivan’s early work, like the work of Root 
and so many others of less genius, was colored 
by Richardson’s influence. The treatment of the 
Auditorium Building, with its heavy masonry 
walls and arches, was suggested by Richardson’s 
design for the Field warehouse. From Richard- 
son must also have come the first suggestion of 
the foliate ornament which Sullivan afterward 
developed so characteristically. On the comple- 
tion of the vast auditorium followed a break- 
down, recuperation, a long communing with 
nature, a gathering of new forces. The return 
to Chicago in 1890 marks the opening of Sulli- 
van’s great creative period. 

His first problem was the novel one of the 
steel-frame office building. The frame must be 
encased for protection against fire. How might 
its indispensable presence be expressed? How 
might the monstrous, unprecedented pile be 
given artistic form? “He felt at once that the 
new form of engineering was revolutionary, de- 
manding an equally revolutionary architectural 
mode. That masonry construction, in so far as 
tall buildings were concerned, was a thing of the 
past, to be forgotten, that the mind might be free 
to face and solve new problems in new functional 

[155] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


forms. That the old idea of superimposition 
must give way before the sense of vertical con- 


tinuity.” So Sullivan wrote in his Autobiog- 


raphy of an Idea, a generation later. The Wain- 
wright Building in St. Louis, designed before 
the close of the year, was the perfect embodiment 
of this conception. z 
His own interpretation of the problem formu- 
lated most clearly his whole philosophy of art: 


“It is my belief that it is of the very essence 
of every problem that it contains and suggests 
its own solution. This I believe to be natural 
law. Let us examine, then, carefully the 
elements, let us search out this contained sug- 
gestion, this essence of the problem. . . . 


“Beginning with the first story, we give this 


a main entrance that attracts the eye to its loca- 


tion, and the remainder of the story we treat in 
a more or less liberal, expansive, sumptuous 
way—a way based exactly on the practical neces- 


sities, but expressed with a sentiment of largeness 


and freedom. The second story we treat in a 
similar way but usually with milder pretension. 
Above this, throughout the indefinite number of 
typical office tiers, we take our cue from the in- 


dividual cell, which requires a window with its 


separating pier, its sill and lintel, and we, with- 
out more ado, make them look all alike because 
they are all alike. This brings us to the attic, 


[156] 


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Courtesy of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue Associates 


Later Goruic 
The Chapel at West Point 


Tue STEEL FRAME 


The Wainright Building, St. Louis 


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WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE 


which, having no division into office cells, and no 
special requirement for lighting, gives us the 
power to show by means of its broad expanse of 
wall, and its dominating weight and character, 
that which is the fact—namely, that the series of 
office tiers has come definitely to an end. . 

“We must now heed the imperative voice of 
emotion. 

“It demands of us, What is the chief charac-’ 
teristic of the tall office building? And at once 
we answer, it is lofty. This loftiness is to the 
artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It is the very 
open organ-tone in its appeal. It must be in 
turn the dominant chord in his expression of it, 
the true excitant of his imagination. It must be 
tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power 
of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of 
exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch 
a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exulta- 
tion that from bottom to top it is a unit without 
a single dissenting line—that it is the new, the 


unexpected, the eloquent peroration of most 


bald, most sinister, most forbidding condi- 
iE. 

~The true, the immovable philosophy of the 
architectural art . . . let me now state, for it 
brings to the solution of the problem a final, 
comprehensive formula: 

~ Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, 
or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work- 
horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the 
winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds 
over all the coursing sun, form ever follows func- 


[157] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


tion, and this is the law. Where function does 
not change, form does not change. . . . 

“And thus, when native instinct and sensibility 
shall govern the exercise of our beloved art. . . 
when our architects shall cease strutting hand- 
cuffed and vainglorious in the asylum of a 
foreign school . . . when we know and feel 
that Nature is our friend, not our implacable 
enemy, then it may be proclaimed that we are 
on the high-road to a natural and satisfying art, 
an architecture that will soon become a fine art 
in the true, the best sense of the word, an art that 
will live because it will be of the people, for the 
people, and by the people.” 


In the Wainwright Building, wall surface was 


abandoned for a system of pier and panel which 
symbolized the concentrated support of the steel 
columns. That the terra cotta which gave fire 
protection was no self-supporting masonry, but a 
mere casing, was expressed with success by a 
delicate surface ornament. The height was 
emphasized by unbroken continuity of the multi- 
plied vertical piers. The building became indeed 
“every inch a proud and soaring thing,” filled 
with the “force and power of altitude.” 


In the design Sullivan rose superior to any 


merely mechanical theory of expression. He 
achieved unity of form arbitrarily. The steel 
[158] 


WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE 


occurs only at alternate piers, yet all are alike. 
The artist has felt, not calculated. The build- 
ing is vitally unified in a form deeply felt by its 
creator. 

Such works emphasized the novel element in 
modern life, rather than its continuity with the 
past. Their realistic treatments of its subject 
matter had an obvious relation with the realistic 
movements of the nineteenth century in painting 
and sculpture, in literature and music. Painting 
from Courbet through the impressionists and 
neo-impressionists, sculpture in the hands of 
Carpeaux and Rodin, the music-drama of 
Wagner, which moved Sullivan so deeply, the 
novels and plays of Tolstoi, Flaubert, Zola and 
Ibsen, all consciously sought characteristic 
beauty through truth to nature, rather than ab- 
stract beauty through relations of form. The 
men of fundamental greatness, indeed, preserved 
a sense of form in the other arts, as in architec- 
ture. The lesser men, however, the imitators— 
their attention distracted from creation to 
reproduction—fell into a chaos which we see, for 
instance, in Monet’s successors, where all form is 
dissolved in light. 

[159] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


Against this formlessness, this scientific ob- — 


servation of nature, this equation of beauty with 


truth or half-truth, there had begun, even before 


1890, a reaction which was to have far-reaching 
consequences. Cézanne, still obscure and unre- 
garded, wrote, “All in nature is modeled accord- 
ing to the sphere and the cone and the cylinder,” 
and undertook, as he said, to build a bridge 
between the impressionists and the Louvre. 
Scientific anatomy and photographie fore- 
shortening began to give way. In literature 
Whitman inaugurated a renaissance of verse, 


with a multitude of novel experiments in form. — 


New leaders in music tended to abandon efforts 


to express literary ideas and to revert to the pure 


language of tone, enriched by new scales and — 


harmonies. In this renewed worship of form 
there was much that emphasized relation to the 
great past. Ingres and Greco and Bach were 
hailed and worshiped as moderns. 

One of the first of the movements to restore the 
supremacy of abstract form was gathering force 
in American architecture in the New York of the 
late ’eighties. Its standard bearers were Mc- 
Kim, Mead and White. Charles Follen McKim, 

[160] 


WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE 


of Quaker ancestry, austere and delicate in his 
tastes, with indomitable allegiance to artistic 
ideals, had been the third American to study at 
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Stanford White, 
virile and overflowing with energy, reveling in 
rich materials, in color and ornament, had passed 
an apprenticeship with Richardson. His tall 
figure, with red bristling hair, was visible above 
the crowd in every gay artistic assemblage. 
Mead, the wise counselor, had been trained in 
the school at Florence. Of the three, he was the 
only one who began with a leaning to the classic. 
The portfolios which McKim and White brought 
back from France were full of the picturesque 
high-roofed chateaux which had inspired Hunt. 
Their first designs used medieval forms. Ir- 
regular, romantic dispositions governed their 
early work, not only in the Queen Anne manner, 
but in the revived Colonial for which they were 
the chief sponsors. 

Their stimulus to a calmer unity of form came 
from one of their designers, the gifted and un- 
fortunate Joseph Morrill Wells. On the walls 
of the office still hang his two sober drawings of 
the Farnese Palace and of Lescot’s wing of the 

[161] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


Louvre, representing his classic ideals, which be- 
came those of his great associates. Although no 
word of theory ever came from any of them, they 


must have felt intuitively what a French critic — 


later wrote, that “instead of constructing first, 
without thinking of the final appearance, promis- 
ing to use the nature of the construction in the 
decoration, one should banish the ingenuities of 
structure among the secondary means, unworthy 
to appear in the completed work.” 

Like men in other periods of renewed interest 
in unity and purity of form, the fifteenth and 
eighteenth centuries, they turned to the classic, 
in which the preeminent manifestations of pure 
or abstract form, as opposed to a structural or 
plastic emphasis, have doubtless been achieved. 
Its elements—masses and spaces of geometrical 
simplicity—offered an _ established language 
widely understood. 

For this second classic revival there was little 
stimulus in contemporary Europe. It was 
American in its origins and was to remain Amer- 
ican in its leadership. Although the leaders 
were men of European training, it was not the 
style of their French masters which determined 
theirs. To characteristic emphasis and lavish 

[162] 


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WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE 


dynamic energy, they opposed an almost mathe- 
matical simplicity, a Dorian harmony. It can 
scarcely be doubted that the underlying influence 
must be sought in the heritage of classic monu- 
ments from the formative period of the nation 
which McKim and his associates had been the 
first to appreciate. Thus the founders of the 
republic, after a half-century of confusion, once 
more imposed their artistic ideal. 

An interpretation of architecture, as they 
tacitly conceived it, in terms of mass and space, 
instead of structure, was indeed to be the theory 
of the future. Its foundations were laid by Ger- 
man and Italian thinkers independently, but 
after the first decisive American works. Wells, 
McKim and White thus led a new van. Their 
mature work was not merely a belated historical 
revival, a continuation of the nineteenth century 
eclecticism, willing to choose between all styles, 
classic being one. It was rather an affirmation 
of a different principle of style. It used classic 
elements, to be sure, but it was not merely imita- 
tive. It reaffirmed the supremacy of form, and 
worked in the classical spirit of unity, uniformity 
and. balance. 

The earliest building fully to embody the new 

[163] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE ~ 


manner was the group of the four Villard houses _ 
in New York, built in 1885. No attempt was 
made to demark or characterize them individ- 
ually; on the contrary they were welded into a 
single great palace, simple and uniform. Brown- 
stone, retained as the material over the protests — 
of the architects, was handled with fine feelmg. — 
The details were suggested by the Italian 
Renaissance, with reminiscences of the Cancel- 
laria, but the building was far from being a 
copy. Its significance lay less in its derivative — 
forms than in its harmonious order and serenity 
of spirit. 

A series of genial works quickly followed. In 
the Century Club and in Madison Square 
Garden, on which White and Wells worked to- 
gether, the Renaissance details were vitalized by 
a rich flowering of ornament held within simple — 
bounds, and executed in terra cotta with all 
White’s understanding of materials. 

Before the close of the decade came McKim’'s — 
design for the Boston Library. The square mass 
was unbroken by any projection, the cornice made 
a continuous bounding line. The long ranks of 
massive arches were carried blandly, without the 

[164] 


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WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE 


slightest interruption, across the variations of 
interior use. In Paris Gaudet was saying what 
a great effect such a uniform front would have 
by contrast to the Beaux-Arts system of articula- 
tion, but there his words fell on unheeding ears. 
McKim’s initiative was independent. The sug- 
gestion came to him doubtless from the Library 
of Ste. Geneviéve in Paris, built when France it- 
self was under Greek influence, but the serried 
proportions of his design, the boldness and depth 
of relief gave it a different character, a majesty 
of its own. Inside, the same harmony prevailed, 
with a richness and sobriety of sculptured and 
painted decoration which was new in America. 
‘The battleground of the two forces, for the 
supremacy between form and function, between 
East and West, was the World’s Fair of 1893. 
Chicago, which had won the preliminary contest 
between cities for the privilege of holding the 
fair, was eagerly alive to its opportunity. But 
twenty years from a day when it lay in ashes, it 
was to justify before the world its aspiration to 
be a world metropolis, a center of civilization and 
art as well as of trade. The fair was to body 
forth this dream. 
[165] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


At first it was thought that the whole work 
might be given to Burnham and Root. ‘The 
time was too short. Burnham became Chief of 
Construction. Root, as consulting architect, be- 
gan studies to determine the general character 
of the buildings. These already show an inten- 
tion to abandon the conservatory aspect of the 
older expositions, and to suggest permanent 
buildings—a dream city. ‘They were of a free 
style, with some recognition of the steel con- 
struction, but still reminiscent of Richardson’s 
Romanesque. 

Meanwhile the architects had been appointed 
for the individual buildings—five from the East, 
five from the West. On the eve of their meeting 


came the death of Root. Many have speculated 


on what might have been the outcome had he 
lived. It is doubtful whether it would have been 
very different. Burnham was already dazzled 
by the prestige of the Eastern men, whose com- 
mon training in the Beaux-Arts tradition in- 
clined them to a formal plan, to unity of the 
ensemble, and to classic rather than free or 
medieval forms. ‘They made common cause, 
while the Western men aimed at personal 
[166] | : 


WHAT IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE 


variety. It was thus not wholly arbitrary that 
the central group, closely knit, fell to the 
Easterners, the outer buildings, scattered among’ 
the greenery and the lagoons, to the Western 
men. The central group became a Court of 
Honor, to which the designers, throwing aside 
their preliminary sketches where each had sought 
to outdo the other, quickly agreed to give a 
uniform cornice, a uniform brilliant whiteness, 
and a general congruity of style, the classic. The 
sheds of steel and wood disappeared behind 
majestic colonnaded fronts. Within the diver- 
sity which this still allowed, McKim’s building, 
suggestive of the Roman baths, with vast 
columns rising from ground to cornice, was the 
one to captivate the beholders. 

The Westerners, with a single exception, 
ranged freely among the historic styles. Sullivan 
was the only man to seek a novel expression. 
Still permeated with subtler historical remin- 
iscences—Roman, Romanesque and Moorish— 
his Transportation Building was given a char- 
acter of its own by its wealth of color, its rich 
flowering of original ornament about the vast 
Golden Doorway. 

[167] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


Burnham, keen in his judgment of trends and 
of men, took as his own designer, in place of 
Root, Charles Attwood of New York, who seized 
on McKim’s Roman style, and even outdid him 
in simplicity, in breadth, and in beauty of pro- 
portion. Attwood’s great peristyle toward the 
lake, his Palace of the Fine Arts, mirrored in the 
lagoon, were of unforgettable dignity and gran- 
deur. 

The cumulative impression of the classic 
phantasm was overwhelming. The throng of 
visitors, many of whom were seeing large build- 
ings for the first time, was deeply stirred by the 
ordered magnificence and harmony of the Court 
of Honor. The example of unified effort and 
effect, associated with the classic forms in which 
it had been achieved, was stamped on the memory 
of the whole nation. 

The issue, whether function should determine 
form from within or whether an ideal form might 
be imposed from without, had been decided for a 
generation by a sweeping victory for the formal 
ideal, 


[168] 


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i TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM 


a 


CHAPTER XIII 


THE TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM 


THE effect of the Chicago Fair was electric. 
American architecture turned to the formal, the 
classical, the monumental. A Roman grandeur 
now replaced Italian delicacy and the luxuriance 
of the first works. 

Coming in the teeth of the hostile reigning 
theory of function, the work of McKim and his 
associates was indeed at first attacked as arbi- 
trary and even as false. The public, however, 
was quick to respond to the basic appeal of 
groups of unified and dominated masses, to the 
musical compositions of interior space. Other 
architects, often still mouthing an opposite in- 
herited theory, were borne along by the new 
current. 

Although, to many of the later works of the 
school, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts contributed its 
analytical science and virtuosity of planning, it 
is mistaken to suppose the movement itself to be, 

[171] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


as Jacques Gréber has asserted, “prewve de la 
force d’expansion du génie francais.” ‘The scores 
of students who have returned from the un- 
rivaled discipline and emulation of the Paris 
school, have had here to lay aside their French 
language of form, and learn anew a language 
which had been that of their greatest ancestors. 
Not one has permanently escaped the influence 
of the American classic. 

Using the Roman alphabet, the established 
universal terms of classical form, the American 
designers made what had been thought a dead 
language the idiom of current speech, express- 
ing with unexpected flexibility the ideas of a new 
age. ‘To a degree unknown in a century of 
Babel, they made it common to the whole body 
of designers and workmen, who thus could easily 
understand one another all over a great conti- 
nent. They were able to work forward in com- 
mon effort. A coherent body of tradition was 
again established. As in the old days before 
wide historical knowledge, the artist stood on the 
shoulders of his forerunners. The general 
nature of his work established, he felt not bound, 
but free to vary, develop and refine his utter- 

[172] . 


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TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM 


ance. In the sympathetic study of the elements 
themselves, of profiles, of color, of departures 
from mechanical regularity through curvature 
and inclination, of the problems arising in adap- 
tation to new uses, to a new and vaster scale, he 
felt he had a sufficient field for his creative 
powers. 

McKim and his fellows went on from triumph 
to triumph, finding in the early buildings of the 
Republic a supporting tradition and a national 
sanction. 

The city of Washington, since the early days, 
had grown with little direction. At the turn of 
the century, the men who had made the White 
City in Chicago were summoned to outline the 
development of the national capital. Serious 
changes had been made in the original plan; 
errors generally felt to be beyond repair. L’En- 
. fant’s Mall, which was to make a long formal 
vista westward from the Capitol, had been 
planted by Downing as a romantic landscape 
park with winding roads, and trees, irregularly 
disposed, already grown tall. Squarely across 
it lay the tracks of a great railroad terminal. The 
Washington Monument, which was to have stood 

[173] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


where the vistas of Capitol and White House 
crossed, had been located, for better foundations, 
neither just on the one line nor on the other. 
Burnham and McKim, who with Olmsted the 
younger and the sculptor St. Gaudens formed 
the Park Commission, took the bravest and 
simplest way. In spite of all obstacles, they 
restored L’Enfant’s plan. Under Burnham’s 
persuasion the railroad abandoned its devastat- 
ing central site. The western vista was boldly 
pointed fair at the Monument, ignoring square- 
ness. Beyond a terrace to the west, a pool, a 
vast circular mirror, marked the crossing of the 
southern vista from the White House. L’En- 
fant’s plan had gone no farther west or south. 
The Monument in his plan had stood on the 


marshy bank of the Potomac. With the same © 


courage L’Enfant had shown in planning be- 
yond his day, the new commissioners extended 
his lines far out over the tidal flats. Thus they 
created at the outer ends two new monumental 
sites of the first importance. They destined one 
for a Lincoln Memorial, the other for a shrine 
to the founders of the republic. The suggested 
forms harmonized yet contrasted with those of 
[174] 


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TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM 


the Capitol, the White House and the Monu- 
ment. 

The government buildings, since the Civil 
War, had run the gamut of materials and of 
historic styles. The commissioners now pro- 
posed a return to the calm and uniform classic 
of the founders. The White House had been 
defaced by conservatories without; within, 
Victorian overstuffing and screens of painted 
glass had given it the character of a Pullman car 
or a river steamboat. For its enlargement two 
overshadowing circular pavilions had recently 
been proposed. McKim swept away the outer 
excrescences, restored Jefferson’s lateral colon- 
nades, and subordinated the new offices at the 
end. Inside, if he did not fully achieve the char- 
acter of the original work, still imperfectly 
understood, he at least returned to consonant 
classical forms. New government buildings 
established not only the proposed lines on the 
Mall, but the intended, quiet, formal character of 
the whole setting for the focal monuments. 

The Park Commission had no autocratic 
authority. Its designs were backed by little 
greater power than their own persuasive force. 

[175] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


They have been able to withstand every on- 
slaught, and to-day, after a generation, are estab- 
lished in their essentials. They justified Burn- 
ham’s prophetic insight when he said, in his 
finest utterance: “Make no little plans. They 
have no magic to stir men’s blood, and probably 
themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, 
aim high in hope and work, remembering that a 
noble and logical diagram, once recorded will 
never die, but long after we are gone will be a 
living thing, asserting itself with ever growing in- 
sistence. . . . Let your watchword be order 
and your beacon, beauty.” 

In San Francisco, in Chicago, in the distant 
Philippines, Burnham led the way in an imagina- 
tive reincarnation of the cities. Chicago dis- 


covered its lake and its rivers. Along the front 


it created its endless drives and lagoons, pro- 
jected its civic forum dominating a vast man- 
made harbor. New York put the railway under 
ground, and above, created Park Avenue with 
its colossal uniform buildings. Philadelphia, 
awaking to its vast wealth, boldly broke its Park- 
way through a neglected quarter from the center 
to the Schuylkill at Fairmount. It has crowned 
[176] 


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TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM 


this acropolis with a great temple of the arts, 
and is lining the way to its foot with the new 
homes of its venerable institutions of culture. 
The reaction against romanticism, evident in 
these great works of town planning, was equally 
influential in the design of estates and houses. 
White had early reverted to the formal garden, 
which was soon to find a master in Charles Platt. 
A painter-etcher, saturated with the garden- 
craft of Italy, he made, for his friends of St. 
Gaudens’ artistic colony at Cornish, gardens 
which made his services everywhere in demand. 
From gardens and their decorative structures it 
was an easy step to houses and estates treated as 
a single whole. Broad terraces with steps and 
fountains, walled parterres with hedges, statu- 
ary and quiet pools were his elements for an 
intimate union of architecture and sculpture, of 
water and vegetation. Sometimes the forms of 
detail were Italian, as in the Harold McCormick 
place at Lake Forest, with its terraces above the 
lake; sometimes they were suggested by early 
American precedents as in Eastover, or the 
Manor House at Glen Cove. Always they were 
tranquil, balanced, serene. These qualities, 
[177] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


shared with the works of the first leaders of the 
movement, dominated in the work of Pope, of 
Delano and Aldrich, and others who now joined 
in establishing the tone of domestic architecture. 
The magnificent ostentation of the eighties gave 
place to an easy refinement, a reserved elegance. 

In monumental buildings the favorite motives 
of the early Republic came again to honor. ‘The 
banks reverted to the models of Latrobe, end- 
lessly varied. For the largest of them, the 
National City, McKim took the old New York 
Merchants Exchange, and placed a Corinthian 
story above its great Ionic front. Its long 
colonnade, with that of the old Treasury, gave 
suggestions for the front of the vast New York 
Post Office and many another work. A Roman 
triumphal arch, such as Bulfinch had erected to 
celebrate Washington’s inauguration, was built 
by White for the centenary of that event, and 
made permanent in marble. Mills’ tall Greek 
Doric column became the model for McKim’s 
monument to the martyrs of the Prison Ships 
and for the memorial of Perry’s victory on Lake 
Erie. 

The ordered form and classic spirit of the Uni- 

[178] 


TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM 


versity of Virginia, which McKim and White 
were soon to restore after fire, gave the sugges- 
tion for their academic groups at Columbia and 
New York Universities. In each a great library, 
with low massive dome, dominated a balanced 
court of sober related buildings. Rarely have 
there been finer conceptions of the centralized 
vaulted hall than in these two rotundas, one 
square below with four vast arches and colon- 
nades, the other a perfect circle, with a single 
continuous ring of columns, an unbroken over- 
arching hemisphere. The austerity of one, the 
richness of the other, glowing with bronze and 
gold, reflected the personalities of McKim and 
of White, here matched one against the other in 
friendly emulation. 

The domed church, of the type Mills had 
chosen for the evangelical sects, suggested itself 
again to White, when he had to build for the 
Presbyterians in Madison Square. His task was 
indeed discouraging. The site was surrounded 
by high commercial structures; on the opposite 
corner was soon to rise the highest building in the 
world. Any conventional church tower would 
have been trivial and ineffective. He chose a 

[179] 


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AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


solid cubical mass with a low dome, a colossal 
portico of polished granite, as overpowering by 
its vast scale as the neighboring structure was by 
its height. As always with White, the materials 
and textures were given a rich and masterly 
treatment. 

Lingering scruples long prevented the bodily 
imitation of the temple, but fruitful suggestions 
were found in other antique types, unregarded 
in earlier days. ‘The peristyle, completely sur- 
rounding the building, reappeared in John 
Russell Pope’s Temple of the Scottish Rite at 
Washington, a superb restudy of the motive of 
the ancient Mausoleum. The square mass rising 
above the broad simple terraces of approach, the 
colonnade with its perfect uniformity every way, 
the centralizing pyramid above, unite in an effect 
of overwhelming simplicity and grandeur. 

A design of unique brilliance, embodying in 
extreme form the classic ideal of unity, won for 
Guy Lowell the competition for the New York 


Court House. The site, an irregular polygon, the 


many similar court rooms required, made the 

problem one of great difficulty. Practical and 

artistic conditions alike were satisfied in the form 
[180] 


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TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM 


conceived by Richmond, one of Lowell’s de- 
signers—a, perfect circle, with a ring of court- 
rooms, story above story, round a circular wait- 
ing hall. It was a type of mass which had not 
been adopted since the building of Hadrian’s 
great monument in Rome, of which the core sur- 
vives in the Castle of St. Angelo. The war inter- 
vened to delay the execution and increase the 
cost. Economy then dictated the abandonment 
of the circular form for a hexagonal one, still 
notable in its crystalline quality. 

A perfect realization of the classic ideal was 
reached in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. 
The struggle which preceded its building showed 
that the conceptions of the artistic leaders had 
been firmly grasped by some of the controlling 
figures of public life. Against the other romantic 
sites proposed, it held its place of honor on the 
main axis. McKim had shown there an oblong 
temple-like peristyle, placed across the line of 
the vista, sheltering a colossal statue of the 
savior of the Union. This scheme was retained 
by Henry Bacon—one of McKim’s artistic heirs 
with a Greek sensitiveness and refinement all his 
own—who was entrusted with the work. A long 

[181] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


canal bordered with straight avenues was led 
from the obelisk to the foot of vast circular 
terraces which uphold the pedestal. A wall 
within the surrounding columns was raised above 
in a simple attic, carved with emblems of all the — 
states. Inside, facing the Capitol, from which 
one approaches, is the great brooding figure of 
Lincoln. On the walls of pillared recesses to left 
and right are graved the noble words of his two 
immortal utterances. There is nothing more, ex- 
cept the supreme distinction and peace of the 
architectural forms themselves, handled with 
love and refinement by an artist of quiet and 
choice spirit. There is no effort, other than in 
the statue, specifically to characterize the indi- 
vidual—the uncouthness of the rustic vanishes in 
the nobility of the man—his greatness in the life 
of the nation is marked by the dominance of the 
site, the grandeur of the scale. 

Along with these achievements in simplicity of 
mass went a renewed solicitude for form in in- 
_ terior space. The elementary geometrical shapes 
of sphere and cylinder were variously combined 
in vast vaulted halls. In the banks, the ex- 
changes, the railway-stations they symbolized 
the majesty of finance and of commerce. 

[182] 


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From “Manhattan, the Magical Island,” courtesy of Ben Judah Lubschez 


Tue Music oF SPACE 


The Pennsylvania waiting room, New York 


TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM 


The lofty waiting-room of the Pennsylvania 
Station in New York takes its suggestion from 
the fabrics of imperial Rome. The construction 
of steel is but a hidden means to achieve a 
grandiose scenic effect. The practical functions 
of the room, too, are insignificant. It is con- 
ceived, rather, in accordance with its higher, ideal 
function—as a civic vestibule to the world 
metropolis. In the soaring, musical spaces, the 
spirit of the newcomer is exalted, to evoke in him 
a new ambition, a new power. 

The immense terminal concourse of the Grand 
Central, with its multitudinous unceasing life, 
its sheer towering supports upholding the blue 
vault strewn with the signs of the heavens, is the 
image of the modern cosmos. 

In the design of tall buildings, Sullivan’s ex- 
pression of altitude by accenting the vertical 
lines long imposed itself, not only on the few 
who, like him, sought to abandon inherited forms, 
but on their antagonists. For a score of years it 
held undisputed sway in this, its first province. 
Even men who were content to choose here and 
there among the historic styles, gave at least lip 
source to “structural expression.” When Wool- 

[183] 


“AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


worth called on Cass Gilbert to surpass all other — 


buildings in height, he turned for precedent to 
the Gothic, with its soaring lines, and raised a 
cathedral of commerce. Even the most con- 
sistent devotees of abstract form and of classical 
balance did not remain untouched by these ex- 
amples. In their New York Municipal Build- 
ing, their first true skyscraper, McKim, Mead 
and White marked the lines of the steel columns 
by shallow vertical strips. Above, an arbitrary 
abstract form, a circular crown of columns, con- 
trasted with the structural expression below. 
Even the skyscraper, the very stronghold of 
the defenders of functional expression, was ulti- 
mately to be captured, at least for a moment, by 
the champions of form. Their victory came in 
the building of the Century Holding Company, 
the first of the “millionaire apartments’ built on 
Fifth Avenue shortly before the war. Here 
McKim and his associates no longer com- 
promised, but were true to their own implicit 
theory of form. The steel frame disappeared 
behind tall curtain walls of unbroken masonry, 
the merits of which lay in uniformity, rhythm 
and proportion. Almost simultaneously rose 
[184] 


TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM 


Platt’s Leader-News Building in Cleveland with 
its vast plane surfaces of grooved stone. To 
the vertical lines of Sullivan’s high buildings, 
_ identical with them in mass, they opposed hori- 
zontal belts and horizontal lines. To the sug- 
gestion of the serried trunks of the forest they 
opposed that of the sheer cliff of bedded stone, 
equally impressive in its loftiness. 

The multitude of high apartment buildings 
east of Central Park followed the new example 
with one accord. ‘The Federal Reserve Bank 
raised its vast precipices in the narrow canyons 
down-town. For better or for worse, the struggle 
to express the steel frame, so crucial in the 
nineties, became a dead issue. 

The effect of the new formalism was widely 
felt abroad. The French, who made fun of the 
colonnades at Chicago in 1893, recalled them in 
the Paris Exposition of 1900, so unlike all its 
European predecessors. The English, abandon- 
ing the traditions of Ruskin, became frank in 
admiration. The leaders of the new generation 
there, like Adshead, Richardson and Atkinson, 
came to know America well. With a stimulated 
appreciation of form they strove to base a new 

[185] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


development on their own fine classic architec- 
ture of 1800. Lutyens, at the height of his 


career, abandoned the medieval tradition and 


sought to assimilate the classic spirit. The 


theatric baroque of Wren, which had lived on in 


the “free classic” of Belcher and in the later work 
of Norman Shaw, tended to give way to a quieter 


and more tempered speech. When Harvey 


Corbett built Bush House in the Strand, the first 
great American work on English soil, the chorus 
of tongues in admiration of its boldness and 
simplicity showed how complete was the revolu- 


tion in English taste. In the British colonies — 


American influence was great: the architecture 
of Canada, Australia and New Zealand became 


predominantly American in its style. An urge — 
to simplicity and clarity of form made itself felt | 


all over the world. 

McKim and his associates were eager to 2 
petuate their style by other means besides stone. 
With the eternal hope of elder generations, run- 
ning counter to the endless creative renewal of 


art, they labored to found institutions which 


should be the guardians of their established 
order. Ata great dinner in Washington McKim 
[186 ] 


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TRIUMPH OF CLASSICAL FORM 


brought together the heads of state and church 
to establish and sanctify the supremacy of classic 
form. The Commission of Fine Arts was 
created to defend the plans for Washington; the 
American Academy in Rome to crown the edu- 
cation of youth; the American Academy of Art 
and Letters to recognize and dignify the elders. 
All seemed fair as the war interrupted for a 
moment the prodigious activity in building. 


[187] 


XIV 


COUNTER-CURRENTS 


CHAPTER XIV 


COUNTER-CURRENTS 


At THE height of the classical flood, Louis 
Sullivan, aged and defeated but still undaunted, 
refused to believe his ship had sunk but spoke of 
it as a submarine. It did, indeed, continue to 
move beneath the surface, borne on by an under- 
current. 

Sullivan still worked, although the great com- 
missions in the West fell increasingly to others, 
who adopted the reigning taste. The Wain- 
wright tomb, cubical and domed, with strong 
simple bands of characteristic ornament, gates 
and doors freshly imagined, is perhaps the most 
significant of his later designs. His little banks, 
conceived as an expression of the strong box, lack 
the magisterial conviction of the Wainwright 
Building. He found in them no vitally new 
problem, no new construction, to bear him up. 
When he had again to do with steel, in the 
Guaranty or Prudential Building in Buffalo, he 

[191] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


repeated the formule of the Wainwright Build- 
ing with little modification. Thus, in the phrase 
of his chief artistic heir, Sullivan remained 
essentially a man of one building. 

The spirit of freedom from historie precedent, 
or at least of freedom in using it, persisted to a 
certain degree in the work of many Chicago 
architects. Pond at Hull House and elsewhere, 
Perkins in his schools, Howard Shaw in his 
country houses, were but a few of those who 
strove for a new idiom. Some of their buildings, 
like Shaw’s Bartlett house at Lake Geneva, with 
its garden court, are of much beauty. Con- 
sciously or unconsciously, historical reminiscence 
still played a great réle in them. Neither in the 
elements nor in the dispositions were they funda- 
mentally and richly creative. 

A single figure of genius emerged in the gen- 
eration after Sullivan: Frank Lloyd Wright, 
Sullivan’s favorite helper, who had from the be- 
ginning the force to rise above imitation and 
discipleship. ‘Thoroughly grounded in engineer- 
ing, he had, not less than Sullivan, the soul of a 
lover and an artist. A reader of Goethe, he too 
was a worshiper of nature. 

[192] 


a ae oe ee ee et ee rn 


Me i Js 
Be ian ts Bi is 


COUNTER-CURRENTS 


His first work, the Winslow house, built in the 
year of the Chicago Fair, already shows elements 
of his mature style, developed in the houses of 
following years, with conscious adaptation to the 
wide horizons of the prairie. The plan is flexible, 
ramified, unsymmetrical, built up exclusively of 
rectangular elements, with each practical sub- 
division segregated, each wing, each room 
separately projected into the gardens and into 
the landscape. On the exterior, the effect is of 
repeatedly interrupted and again continued 
masses, of shifting planes, of severe horizontal- 
ism gained by rows of small windows closely 
beneath an immensely projecting, continuous 
roof of gentle slope. The wall is gathered into 
isolated piers. ‘The joints of the brickwork are 
deeply shadowed to accentuate still more the 
horizontal effect. Inside there is again the 
horizontal, in the low ceiling, the strong lines of 
its construction, the wide-stretched, heavy brick 
fireplace. Structural features, newly conceived, 
are everywhere emphasized, in the furnishings as 
well as in the building. Outside and in, the only 
decoration, often, is the living flower, in long 
stone troughs under the windows, in square bowls 

[193] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


on the terraces and gate piers, in vases "eG n- 
ually renewed. The style appears in its perfec- 
tion in the Coonley house and in Wright’s own 
place, Taliesin, twice destroyed by man and 
nature, twice rebuilt with unquenchable courage. | 

His writings, hymning nature and science, 
have emphasized the organic aspect of modern 
art as an outgrowth of changing practical 
problems, of new materials. From the begin- 
ning, he welcomed the machine as the tool of 
modernity, superseding the old handicraft. But 
a single industrial building has fallen to him, in 
which these ideas could find full expression—the 
Larkin Building in Buffalo, for the administra- 
tion of a great factory, set in a district laid waste 
by crass industrialism. There is an astonishingly 
apt conception of the problem in all its practical 
terms: the absence of outlook, the pollution of 
the outer air, the need of light, of inner super- 
vision and order, the desire to standardize and 
mechanize. The interior is treated as a single — 
cubical void, subdivided indeed by slender sup- 
ports for the storied galleries which look inward 
on a long central court. The windows to the 
outer day are high-silled and broad, Boks all 

[194] 


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COUNTER-CURRENTS 


the width from pier to pier. They are not for 
view and air, but to let in the light of the sky. 
The building breathes through the top by vast 
ducts at the corners. The executives, seated in 
the midst among their staff, overlook the whole 
area. ‘The recurrent desks and files, lamps and 
dictaphones, make the sole adornment, except 
that from the upper gallery, devoted to refresh- 
ment, flowers look down. On the exterior the 
organization is one of mass. Every accessory 
element is used to make projection, and to create 
a three-dimensional effect. 

In the same way Wright has sought to analyze 
and to feel the characteristic ideal and practical 
requirements, as well as the novel structural 
aspects, of each problem he has attacked. “Archi- 
tecture,” he has said, “is the Idea of the thing— 
made to sing to heaven.” In his church, the 
Unity Temple at Oak Park, the cubical interior 
with its four equal arms with tiers and galleries, 
its staircases in the angles, gives rise to the out- 
wardly cubical articulated mass. The material, 
concrete, cast in temporary wooden molds, sug- 
gests the box-like form of the walls, the simple 
slab of the roofs. The whole building is a 

[195] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


monolith. The Imperial Hotel at Tokio is again 
a monolith of concrete, cast this time in perma- 
nent molds of brick and lava, with roofs and 
balconies overhanging on a cantilever principle. 
The ornament is of geometrical abstraction, not 
a leaf is carved, though living leaves grow every- 
where. Nature, so loved and studied by the de- 
signer, who foresaw her angry as well as her 
smiling moods, has respected his work. In the 
vast upheaval of the earth which engulfed the 
city, it alone survived. 

In spite of their conscious rationale, Wright, 
in all these works, has remained unconsciously 
the romantic artist. Their effort toward “ex- 
pression,” their exaggeration of the character- 
istic, binds them, in spite of the novelty of their 
forms, to the great romantic tradition. Romantic 
too are the reminiscences of older forms, from 
exotic cultures of the East, which still survive i 
his imagination and in his buildings. 

An independent initiative in the design of in- — 
dustrial buildings was taken by Ernest Wilby, 
associated with Albert Kahn of Detroit, not 
long after the Larkin Building. The adoption 
of reinforced concrete had spaced the piers of 

[196] 


COUNTER-CURRENTS 


factories more widely, without as yet affecting 
their conventional exterior design. Their small 
windows still limited the width of storied mills. 
In the building of the first great Ford plant at 
Highland Park, the idea came of filling the 
whole space from pier to pier with glass, held by 
steel sash of a new type, flooding the stories with 
daylight. In contrast with the old mill construc- 
tion the effect was strongly horizontal. The 
concrete frame could itself be exposed; the wall 
abandoned except for a low parapet below the 
window sills. Thus arose a new type of factory, 
expressive of the new construction. There were 
practical advantages: economy of material, 
greater effective width which could be ade- 
quately lighted. Almost overnight the scheme 
was adopted in thousands of American plants, 
and foreign imitation soon followed. 

The steel sash, strong enough to be self-sup- 
porting over large areas, soon came to have other 
applications. In foundries and power houses of 
a single high story, with traveling cranes sup- 
ported on steel, all the side of the great shed 
could now readily be made of glass, without any 
interruption by intermediate posts. ‘The whole 

[197] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


physiognomy of industrial buildings was quite 
changed. 

The brilliant beginning has, indeed, scarcely 
been followed up in America; Wilby himself felt 
that, with all the expressiveness, beauty had not 
been attained. The first schemes evolved by the 
architects were of such obvious availability that 
they were quickly seized on by engineers, who 
alone are consulted in most American industrial 
work, and applied as formule with little further 
artistic development. 

Wright’s direct followers in America have too 
often, as he has complained, taken the letter for 
the spirit. The idea of an “organic architecture” 
was not understood, but the forms in which he 
clothed it were ignorantly copied, cheapened and 
debased. About Chicago and through the West, 
his “Prairie style” in houses had descended, be- 
fore the war, even to the jerry-builder, eager 
only for a popular catch-word. Few of his 
pupils have had the strength to stand alone. 
Walter Burley Griffin, indeed, was victor in 
competition for the plan of Canberra, the capital 
of federal Australia, but his work in that far 
continent has scarcely risen above the horizon. 

[198] 


COUNTER-CURRENTS 


With Wright himself in exile, the movement he 
led came to a standstill in Chicago and America, 
its forces disintegrating. 

His voice, so little heeded in his own country, 
has meanwhile echoed around the world. It 
found foreign listeners prepared. ‘The same 
_ forces of life and thought which brought it forth 
in America, were beginning to call forth related 
expressions in the Europe of the “nineties. Soon 
after Sullivan’s pioneer achievement, Hankar 
and Horta in Belgium were laying the founda- 
tions for l'art nouveau, with its curved lines sug- 
gestive of plant forms, which flourished among 
the French craftsmen without at first greatly 
affecting architecture. 

It is in Germany that the rebellion against 
historical forms, the Secession, has had the widest 
success. In Vienna Otto Wagner demanded 
that “modern art must yield us modern ideas, 
forms created by us, which represent our abilities, 
our acts, and our preferences.” He, too, recog- 
nized and welcomed the advent of the machine. 
Peter Behrens in Berlin found a fertile field of 
experiment in the power houses and factories of 
modern industry. A new generation has sprung 

[199] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


up, since 1900, of men who no longer think in 
historic terms. “Organic,” the single word of 
praise which Albert Einstein gave Erich Men- 
delsohn, the architect of his unique laboratory, 
may stand as their watchword, as it was 
that of Sullivan, and is that of Wright. Taking 
their suggestion at first from science, the Ger- 
man designers have moved, since Cézanne’s revo- 
lution in painting, toward a more purely artistic 
unity of form. 

In Germany, in Scandinaeee in Holland, in 
the countries on the Slavic frontier, the name of 
Wright is one to conjure with. It was in Ger- 
many that his drawings were first sumptuously 
published; in Holland the leaders have united 
in a splendid tribute. On the other side of the 
world, the Japanese, after the earthquake, 
wanted him to take charge of the rebuilding of 
Tokio. At home his design for a skyscraper 
remains unbuilt. The influence of his ideas here 
is indirect. 


[200] 


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CHAPTER XV 


THE PRESENT 


Wir the close of the Great War, building, 
rudely but briefly interrupted, began anew, with 
even greater energy. Superficially all was much 
as before. The established order, the supremacy 
of classical form, continued, not without vitality 
for new growth. In the composition of mass in 
high buildings it has discovered a new field of 
achievement. Nevertheless, it is threatened with 
more than one danger, within and without. 

Chief of these is a certain loss of momentum. 
Like every other artistic cycle, it had its initial 
stimulus, its great leaders able by the freshness 
of their ideals to give new form to all they 
touched, its army of disciples, following out this 
or that path merely broken by their masters, its 
gradual subjugation of a whole territory. Some 
day must come when there are no new worlds to 
conquer. When a régime has become settled it 
is always its weaknesses which are obvious, and it 

[203] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 

is then, not in the moment of victory, that they 
begin to tell. There is then a weakening of the 
first impetus, a fatigue of the adherents, who be- 
gin to drop away. Ultimately comes a moment 
when the eager spirit of youth is in open re- 
bellion. For the classic cycle in America such a 
time may be long hence—the conquest is too 
recent—but signs of inner exhaustion are not 
wanting. 

From the side of classicism most of the great 
problems of our time have been attacked and 
solved with such perfect conformity to its ideals 
that little room is left for further creative effort — 
in the same direction. In dealing with these 
problems the disciples of McKim are condemned 
to ring the changes on the models already estab- 
lished. These tend to harden into formule, 


sometimes relieved in their application by subtle sf 


restudy of proportion and detail. 
In the effort to vary them there is to-day a 
recrudescence of the old eclecticism, the choice of 
other languages and dialects of historic style. 
Generally these have been ones bordering on the 
classic—the suggestion, for instance, has been 

Byzantine or Romanesque, with a strong clas- 
[204] ae 


From 
“Manhattan, the Magical Island,” 
courtesy of Ben Judah Lubschez 


oa 


THe CATHEDRAL OF MamMon 


Woolworth Building, 
New York 


Tuer Arrow 
Bush Tower, New York 


THE PRESENT 


sical tinge. Renewed experiments have not been 
wanting, however, with the forms of styles more 
sharply distinct, like the Gothic. This experi- 
mental trend is clearly visible in the work of 
_ Harvey Corbett. He has striven to achieve new 
values within the classic tradition, as in his 
Springfield civic group of two isolated cubical 
masses with a campanile between, or in his 
Masonic memorial at Alexandria with its tall 
tower of receding columned stages. He has 
turned also to Gothic as in the arrow-like Bush 
tower, and to other, freer media, as in the tower 
at One Fifth Avenue. There is in this no at- 
tempt to change the basic ideals, but only the 
struggle for creative opportunity, on the part 
of an artist who has reaffirmed his faith in them 
by saying, “I have only one God: beauty of 
form.” 

This diversity has been emphasized by the 
individualism of religious sects, which has ex- 
tended from creeds to the church fabrics them- 
selves. Only in the newer cults, like Christian 
Science, has White’s initiative of a domed audito- 
rium of monumental classic form been widely 
adopted. The other Protestant sects have 

, [205] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


generally preferred to emphasize their early | 
establishment: the evangelical, by reversion to 
the Colonial; the Anglican by adherence to the 
Gothic. In the Anglican Cathedral of St. John 
the Divine in New York, the initial Romanesque 
scheme has later been revised into Gothic, which 
even Burnham was led to believe in for the style 
of the cathedral at Washington. Catholicism 
has found in the Roman basilica a reconciliation 
between its old traditions and the supremacy of 
classical form. 

In the building of houses, local tradition has 
been the most powerful force. In the original 
seaboard states, Colonial example has been ob- 
served more closely, and its provincial varieties 
have become the bases of diverse local develop- 
ments in New England, in the “Dutch Colonial” 
area around New York, in the ledge-stone region 
of Pennsylvania, in the Virginia Piedmont.’ In 
Louisiana, the unique style of the old buildings, 
with its French suggestions, has not been without 
influence. In New Mexico the primitive adobe 
construction has found notable application. 
Most conspicuous has been the following of 
Spanish suggestions, enriched with elements 

[206] 


THE PRESENT 


from other semitropic countries, in Florida and 
Southern California. In all these phases of in- 
herited classic style a great simplicity of charac- 
ter has been held in common. 

Counter to the overwhelming popular interest 
in antique Colonial “Americana,” there has been, 
nevertheless, an increasing tendency among 
architects to eschew the use of any pronounced 
historic forms, and to depend on the loving study 
of textures and on gifted individual craftsmen 
in the allied arts. In this vein, artists like Harrie 
Lindeberg, Lewis Albro and Arthur Meigs have 
achieved personal results of much quiet beauty. 

Proselytes more whole-souled in their conver- 
sion from adherence to precedent have not been 
wanting. The most distinguished was Bertram 
Goodhue. In his best years, when still in the 
prime of life, he abandoned Gothic and classic 
alike, and was struggling to find a new mode of 
expression. In the competition for the great war 
memorial in Kansas City he met a reformed 
classicist of similar tendencies, Van Buren 
Magonigle. Their designs had much in com- 
mon—vast blocklike masses with sculptural en- 
richment, colonnades reduced to lowest terms, in 

[207] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


which only the suggestion and the proportions 
were classical. In Goodhue’s, the chief element 
was a background for colossal sculptured figures, 
recalling somewhat the massive German monu- 
ments of the imperial period. Magonigle’s, now 
in course of execution, was the simpler and more 
impressive. A tall circular buttressed shaft, 
visible for leagues over the prairie, rises from 
an immense platform of masonry, flanked by two 
low cubical structures. The simplicity of motive, 
the contrast between upright and level on a vast 
scale, is of elemental power. 

For the capitol of Nebraska, Goodhue used a 
similar composition—a square tower of extreme 
height rising from the plain, in the midst of a 
vast square low mass, of the utmost architectural 
nudity. Four arms of a great cross rise slightly 
above the outer enclosing mass, and give the 
tower visual support. Although medieval 
reminiscences are everywhere, and the idea of 
the tower itself is a romantic conception, the 
classic spirit of symmetry and uniformity pre- 
vails in the treatment of surfaces and spaces. 
The fusion is not entirely complete. We may 
welcome the experiment, but we must recognize 

[208] 


THE PRESENT 


that the new hybrid still recalls somewhat too in- 
sistently its diverse origins. 

The same disinfected classicism prevails in 
Goodhue’s last work, the building of the Amer- 
ican Academy of Sciences in Washington. 
Downeast at first at the requirement of con- 
formity to the established character of the sur- 
roundings, he strove to vitalize the old formule 
by elimination of columnar elements, by refine- 
ment of profiling and restraint of sculptured 
ornament. In spite of its beauty of material and 
detail, the building suffers from the breaks in the 
simple rhythm of its facade. The forms but not 
the spirit of the classic are there. In these later 
works Goodhue’s achievement is more of a 
negative than a positive character. He has tried 
to expurgate without bringing much that is 
deeply creative. 

Beside such internal movements, a reflux from 
abroad is favoring the drift from the classic. 
Certain American artists have recognized the 
creative liberty secured by the Germans, and are 
trying to free themselves from the bondage of 
academic detail while preserving the American 
heritage of simplicity and unity of form. Thus 

[209 ] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


it is, for instance, with Clarence Zantzinger and 
Charles Borie of Philadelphia. In their earlier 
work on the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the 
refinements of form and the splendors of color 
have shown that the purest classic may still have 
vitality. In their Fidelity Mutual Building, on 
the other hand, without the slightest effect of the 
bizarre which would betray an exotic element, 
the simple forms have freed themselves from the 
chilling hand of precedent. The irregular site 
has been handled brilliantly to produce an un- 
usual balanced composition. ‘The two immense 
arched portals contrast with the long ranges of 
simple piers. Rich sculpture and color and gild- 
ing enhance the effect. 

Another, impulse from abroad was given by 
the Paris exposition of decorative arts in 1925, 
where surviving elements of the art nowveau, 
which had remained in solution, were precipi- 
tated by reagents from Vienna. Under the 
intelligent fostering of Charles Richards, Amer- 
ican manufacturers were interested, and experi- 
ment with new forms has begun again in 
American interiors and furnishing. 

The recrudescence of. materialism which has fol- 

[210] 


THE PRESENT 


lowed the war has thrown the preponderance in 
American architecture on commercial structures 
and other buildings for investment. The un- 
paralleled abundance of public, monumental 
building in the preceding period is not ap- 
proached in the vastly greater total volume of 
construction to-day. The tall office building with 
steel frame is again in the center of interest. By 
itself this has given a new stimulus to fresh ad- 
venture. 

The direction which this has taken was power- 
fully affected by the provisions of the ordinance 
adopted in New York during the war to regulate 
the height of buildings. This law, while arbi- 
trarily limiting the general height of wall on the 
street line in different regions or zones of the 
city, allowed certain portions of the wall to ex- 
ceed this height, permitted walls to rise still 
higher in proportion as they were set back from 
the street, and placed no limitation of height on 
a tower which should occupy not more than one- 
quarter of the site. Some of these provisions 
recognized tendencies already evident. The ad- 
vantages of outlook and light had already led 
often to the abandonment of inner for outer 

[211] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


courts, deeply indenting the front, and modeling 
the upper part of long facades with comb-like 
teeth. In the race for height, with its advantages 
of réclame, it had already proved less costly to 
carry skyward but a part of the whole building. 
The Singer Tower, the Metropolitan Tower, and 
the Woolworth Tower, which had successively 
outrivaled all others, had given the suggestion. 
The other clauses of the law now encouraged 
further departures from the single cubical mass 
usual in the early office buildings. | 

In many structures of mere utility, the legal . 
provisions have been allowed to have their effect 
mechanically without the effort to fuse and recast 
the form in the creative spirit. Some of these 
raw novel products of law and economics, like 
the buildings of the Garment Center, with their 
vast bulk stepped in receding stories, already 
show elements of style, and achieve a new aspect. 

In the hands of the artistic leaders the crude 
masses have fallen into order. It is with the 
sculpturing of mass, hitherto always possible but 
little regarded in the higher buildings, that they 
are now concerned. Surface and detail have be- 
come less significant. The towers thrust them- 

[212] 


THE PRESENT 


selves upward, bastioned all about. In their 
grouping there is an infinitude of possibilities. It 
matters little whether every foot of cubic space 
within the legal “envelope” is filled. Volume for 
volume desired, the steel frame may as easily be 
high as broad. The air above is free to enclose. 
Already these varied opportunities are being 
avidly seized. Among the new works daily tak- 
ing form are certain masterly creations. 

In the Shelton Hotel, the work of Arthur 
Loomis Harmon, the tower stands broadside to 
the street. From the front, the building seems 
not merely to have a tower, but to be atower. In 
three great leaps of rhythmic height it rises, 
gathering in its forces for the final flight. The 
vertical files of rooms, alternately projected, 
leave shallow recesses, making tall upright lines 
which continue uninterrupted into the silhouette 
against the sky. At the top, the great windows 
of the pool terminate the uniform underlying 
pattern of the small openings below. Faint 
touches of Italian Romanesque detail are in- 
significant in the essential freshness of concep- 
tion. 

In the great office building, broader and lower, 

[213] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


built by Ely Jacques Kahn at the foot of Park 
Avenue, there are only three simple masses, three 
diminishing cubes, the upper ones distinguished 
by broad use of color. The staged tower of the 
Babylonians comes again to life. 

Here and in the Shelton all is rectangular, 
cubical. In the Fraternity Clubs, solids of other 
forms appear, octagonal and circular. The use 
of masses other than the cubical had already been 
suggested in the crowns of the Municipal and 
Bush Towers; now the enrichment of form is 
carried into the outer supporting blocks. 

Tht Ritz Tower shoots upward like a slender 
arrow. On one of the most valuable sites in the 
world, its area has been voluntarily contracted 
immediately above the ground stories, with a 
preference for going high rather than spreading 
out. It is such works that have emboldened ~ 
imagination to conceive a city with lance-like 
towers set in open plots of greenery. Such an 
extreme will doubtless never be attained, but it 
- augurs that many new visions still lie hidden in 
the future. ere 

Although the modeling of masses has thus 
absorbed the chief interest, the surfaces remain 

[214] 


Phetograph by Wurts Brothers 


Masses 
Hotel Shelton, New York 


# oR } 
ate A AES AANRAAEERO REE. AT tN 


Bie BURT +, 


Courtesy of Raymond M. Hood 
Mass AND LINE 
The American Radiator Building, New York 


THE PRESENT 


and must have their treatment. Of late there is 
a tendency to abandon the plane enveloping 
curtain of McKim, and again to energize the 
effect with aspiring lines. Raymond Hood led 
the way in this with his American Radiator 
Building, which embodies also so many other 
tendencies of the time: the early contraction of 
the tower to permit windows all about, the 
solicitude for variety of mass evident in the 
octagonal suggestion of the beveled corners and 
in the complex stepping of the upper stages, the 
interest in color. The black piers leap upward, 
tipped with gold, the golden crown blazes in the 
level sun and gleams afar at night. 

When the Chicago Tribune set a great prize 
for the design which should surpass all others, 
projects came from every country. Vertical 
emphasis predominated. Hood and Howells, 
adjudged the winners, in repeating and varying 
the motive of the Radiator Building, took a step 
backward by closely following the details of 
Gothic. The second prize fell to a Finn, Eliel 
Saarinen, who, for his square tower with simple 
receding bastions, evolved a ribbed mantle of 
striking originality. Sullivan hailed it, in his 

[215] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


dying breath, as a Phoenix from the ashes of his 
old hopes. The artist has found little oppor- 
tunity to realize his poetic dream, although 
plagiarists have been quick to turn it into prose. 

Meanwhile other inspired works have been ris- 
ing. The vast bulk of the Telephone Building 
looms on New York’s water-front. The archi- 
tects, McKenzie, Voorhees and Gmelin, have 
given their designer, Ralph Walker, free play. 
Here, as in Corbett’s studies, is an effort to fill 
the maximum legal mass, subject to the require- 
ments of light and the suggestions of steel con- 
struction. A multitude of cubical steppings and 
recessings make the transition from the block be- 
low to the vast square tower with its receding 
summit. ‘Trivial reminiscences of the Gothic 
have fallen away; puerile suggestions of historic 
style no longer mar the interior. As in the best 
German work, all is smelted anew in the creative 
spirit. 

It is in these buildings, particularly in the 
Shelton, that we see the larger unity of American 
modernism, toward the poles of which—func- 
tional expressiveness and abstract form—its 
masters have variously striven. In Sullivan’s 

[216] 


THE PRESENT 


quest of expression he did not lose simplicity of 
mass. His tall buildings are crystalline, cast in 
one jet, like those of McKim and Platt. In spite 
of the difference of their superficial markings, 
vertical or horizontal, they are essentially at one. 
So too, in the upbuilding of the new colossi of 
steel we see the balanced and centralized mode 
which McKim had brought again to honor in low 
buildings of masonry. Scarcely one of the new 
giants has a corner tower, not one has the 
romantic, unbalanced massing which was uni- 
versal in the day of Richardson, and which might 
equally—but for the power of the new classic 
tradition—have ruled to-day. In all the welter 
of experiment, the basic character of our modern 
work—its measured simplicity and_ breadth, 
above all,its clarity—has remained in common. 


[217] 


- 


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a 
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= 


. 


Photograph by Sigurd Fischer, courtesy of McKenzie, Voorhees, and Gmeli 
Mass AND LINE 


The New York Telephone Building 


n 


Oourtesy of K. Lonberg-Holm 


Tuer Groresaur 


Times Square at Night 


CHAPTER XVI 


MANHATTAN 


ON THE narrow island of Manhattan, the heart 
of New York, titanic forces have built the great 
city of the present. 

‘Little more than a generation ago, when the 
centenary of the Constitution was celebrated on 
the site of Federal Hall, Wall Street was but the 
dingily pretentious image of a conventional street 
in any third-rate European capital, the town was 
a shabby overgrown Bloomsbury. Looking at 
the mock chateaux of Fifth Avenue, Henry 
James could liken New York to “an ample child- 
less mother, who consoles herself for her own 
sterility by an unbridled course of adoption.” 

Almost overnight, by the natural richness of 
a new continent exploited with mad energy by 
man and machine, this city has become the center 
of the world, the center of commerce, of finance, 
of power. A wild growth has sprung suddenly 
to the gigantic, surpassing every inherited 

[221] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


measure, grotesque in its assertive individualism, 
in its contrast with survivals of the old. Its first 
qualities are heightened dimension, heightened — 
contrast, heightened insistence, heightened 
energy. Houses rise suddenly to fifty stories, 
among forlorn doomed relics of faded Victorian 
gentility. East and west at a single corner we 
pass from the degraded tenements, half emptied 
by prosperity, to vast new hotels, offices and 
apartment-palaces. On Broadway the endless 
firework of flaming signs leaps and flashes above 
the torrent of traffic, the whirlpool of pleasure.’ 
All is exaggerated, still unordered, but intoxi- 
cating, already full of fantastic beauty. __ 

In the midst of this anarchy certain buildings 
isolate themselves by their own unity and power. — 
Their value lies not merely in dimension, but in 
form. In spite of their variety they have much 
incommon. There are the beginnings of a style. 

Where rebuilding has progressed furthest the 
grotesque aspects tend to vanish, a larger coher- 
ence is visible. Not consciously designed, it is 
none the less real. Down-town, economic forces 
have built in a great pyramid, culminating over 
the costliest sites. A vast man-made mountain 

[222] 


Aegq oy} Wolf uR}eYURIY IIMOT—NIVINAOW LVN ANY, 


DIMA Y 970YT sLoysyqnd ay? fiq ydvsboz,0yg 


2 : ae 


From “Manhattan, the Magical Island,’’ courtesy of Ben Judah Lubschez 


Tue Canyon 


Lower Broadway 


MANHATTAN 


rises from the sea, cleft in its heart by the canyon 
of Broadway. At night a fairy city of light 
floats above the rivers, barred by the mighty 
arcs of their great bridges. 

Already, within the city, as Keyserling has 
felt, turmoil and haste begin to give place to 
peace and leisure. The crude expedients of 
youth begin to disappear, the noise diminishes. 
Men are learning to master their great creature, 
to find room and time again for contemplation 
and for the practise of the gentler arts. 

All over the land the vision of Manhattan has 
captured the imagination. Chicago restlessly 
struggles to outrival New York itself. Phila- 
delphia is building its own great pyramid about 
the tower of City Hall. Detroit, making in a 
year many times more cars than the number of 
its inhabitants, dreams of the highest tower of 
all, soon to be a reality. In little cities of the 
West rise buildings which, laid flat, would reach 
into the open prairie. The spell of the metropolis 
is on them all. 

The traveler from across the sea is dazzled by 
the apparition, as in the days when the pilgrim 
from distant Hungary abased himself before the 

[223] 


AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 


spires and beneath the vaults of Chartres and 
Amiens. Like him, too, he may aspire to go and 
do likewise. But the French Gothic, however 
admired, was never fully understood far beyond 
the borders of the Ile-de France, and was imi- 
tated timidly and with concessions fatal to its 
full effect. It is doubtful if the world may ever 
see, outside America, another Manhattan. 

Every great achievement in building, pushed 
to its extreme by the élan of its creators, has in 
it something of the monstrous, from which those 
who have not gone along step by step will recoil. 
Even at home the evolution outruns its own 
causes and advantages; its own protagonists are 
aghast at the final result. Already the draw- 
backs are apparent, and limiting forces begin to 
operate. It has not been too soon. Above the 
waters stands the magic mountain of’ steel and 
stone, shining and glorious, as one of the crowns 
of human endeavor. 


[224] 


= 
je) 
oe) 
a 
a! 
~ 


EPILOGUE 


ARTISTIC creation is a never-ending stream. In 
art, unlike science, there is no single “right” way. 
Only to stand still is wrong, for that belies the 
imaginative and creative nature of art itself. 
What is modern for one generation is no longer 
modern for the next. We may admire the apt 
epigram of our fathers’ time, but if we persist in 
repeating it, it becomes a platitude to-day. Art 
must change to live. 

In the revaluing which accompanies every such 
change of ideals, many a reputation will go down. 
The little men will have only a historical 
significance. The quality of greatness is to sur- 
vive such changes, by fulfilling the new demands 
as well as the old. Among the American archi- 
tects are more than one who give promise of liv- 
ing on, not merely as the founders of great 
schools of the past, but as masters who can speak 
out of the past in the eternal language of form. 

Which way is forward at the moment will be 
known only from the grand march of events. 

[ 227 ] 


EPILOGUE 


The architect can not act alone, he must be in 
step with his brothers in life and in every art; 
but he may have his great part in establishing 
the direction and carrying his fellows with him. 
Whither the march may turn is not determined 
only by material factors. The soul of man is 
master. 

The path lies in darkness, but as the light 
dawns behind, it will be seen that great deeds 
have been done along the way. 


THE END 


[228] 


NOTES 


This book is based primarily on the writer’s pub- 
lished researches on single topics, which have been 
freely laid under contribution, with the consent of the 
publishers, in the text. 

Few attempts have hitherto been made to discuss the 
history of American architecture as a whole, either by 
itself or as part of a general study of American art. 
Talbot F. Hamlin’s The American Spirit of Architec- 
ture (1926) is a rich collection of illustrations with 
brief interpretive and critical text. Lewis Mumford’s 
Sticks and Stones: a Study of American Architecture 
and Civilization (1924) has its emphasis on the second 
term of the subtitle. Jacques Gréber’s L’architecture 
aux Etats-Unis: preuve de la force d’ expansion du 
génie francais, 2 vols. (1920) is mainly a study of con- 
temporary types, and emphasizes particularly the 
French contribution, studied also in Louis Réau’s L’art 
francais aux Etats-Unis (1926). Werner Hegemann 
and Elbert Peets’ Amerikanische Architektur and 
Stadtbaukunst (1925), adapted from the same authors’ 
American Vitruvius: an Architect’s Handbook of Civic 
Art (1922), is concerned chiefly with the problems of 
formal, spatial design.* 


*Since this manuscript was in the publisher’s hands there has 
appeared Thomas E. Tallmadge’s The Story of Architecture in 
America, New York, Norton (1927). It is of independent value 
only in its discussion of the Chicago school of 1880 and onward, 
on which it gives some important material. 


[231] 


NOTES 


COLONIAL PERIOD AND EARLY REPUBLIC 
For the Colonial period and the early republic a 
very full bibliography has been published by Richard 
F.. Bach in the Architectural Record, vol. LIX (1926), 
pp. 265 ff. | 
Here are given only certain references amplifying or 
illustrating the discussion in this book: 


General 


Wituiam Rotcu Warr, ed: The Georgian Period, in 
American Architect, 1898-1902. A corpus of early 
measured drawings and pioneer discussions. 

Kimpatu: Architecture in the History of the Colonies 
and of the Republic, in American Historical Review, 
vol. XXVI (1921), pp. 47-57, has discussion of the 
relation between European and early American 
work, especially primitive shelters and churches. 


Public Works 
Kimsauu: Jefferson and the First Monument of the 
Classical Revwal in America (the Virginia Capitol), 
1915. 
Kimpatui: The Origin of the Plan of Washington in 
Architectural Review, vol. VII (1918), pp. 41-45. 
Expert Preets: The Genealogy of L’Enfant’s Wash- 
ington in Journal of the American Institute of 
Architects, vol. XV (1927) pp. 115, 151, 187. 

GLENN Brown: History of the United States Capitol, 
2 vols. Washington, Government Printing Office, 
1900-1903. 


[232] 


NOTES 


Documentary History of the United States Capitol, 
Washington Government Printing Office, 1904. 

Kimpatt and Wetts Bennetr: The Competition for 
the Federal Buildings, 1792-93 in Journal of the 
American Institute of Architects, vols. VII-VIII 
(1919-20). 

We ttis Bennett: Stephen Hallet and his Designs for 
the National Capitol, ib., vol. IV (1916), pp. 290, 
324, 376, 411. 

Kimpatt and Bennett: William Thornton and his 
Designs for the National Capitol, in Art Studies, 
vol. I (1923) pp. 76-92. 

History of Public Buildings under the Control of the 
Treasury Department, Washington, Government 
Printing Office, 1901. 

The Diary of John McComb, Jr. in American Archi- 
tect, vol. XCIII, (1908), p. 15. 

The Original Plans of the City Hall, New York, ib., 
pp. 43-46. 

Montcomery Scuurter: The New York City Hail, 
in Architectural Record, vol. XXIII (1908), pp. 
387-390. 

Epwarp 8S. Witpe: John McComb, Jr. Architect, in 
American Architect, vol. XCIV, pp. 49-53, 57-63. 

I. N. Puexps Sroxes: The Iconography of Manhattan 
Island, vol. I, (1916), pp. 454-456, 460-467 (on 
Joseph Mangin). 

C. C. May: The New York City Hall, in Architectural 
Record, vol. XX XIX (1916), pp. 309, 474, 513. 

[233] 


NOTES 


Kmart: The Genesis of Jefferson’s Plan for the 
University of Virginia, in Architecture, vol. XLVIII 
(1923), pp. 397-399. 

Kimsatu: Jefferson the Architect (The University of 
Virginia), in Forum, vol. LX XXV (1926), pp. 926- 
931. 

Kimpatit: The Bank of Pennsylvania, in Architectural 
Record, vol. XLIV (1918), pp. 132-139. 

Kimpatt: The Bank of the United States, 1818- 
1824, in Architectural Record, vol. LVIII (1925), 
pp. 581-594. 

Epwarp Bippze: Girard College, in Proceedings of the 


Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Phila- 
delphia, vol. XXVIII (1919), pp. 199-215. 


Churches 


Ayman Empury II: Early American Churches, New 
York, Doubleday, 1914. 

C. A. Puace: From Meeting House to Church in New 
England, in Old-Time New England, vols. XIII, 
XIV (1923), pp. 149, 3. 

Kimsati: Latrobe's Designs for the Cathedral of 
Baltimore, in Architectural Record, vol. XLII 
(1917), p. 540, LIIL (1918), p. 37. 


Domestic Architecture 


Kimpatt: Domestic Architecture of the American 
Colonies and of the Early Republic, New York, 
Scribner’s, 1922. 

[234] 


NOTES 


J. E. Cuanpier: The Colonial House, New York, Mc- 
Bride, Winston, 1916. 

Lreicu Frencu: Colonial Interiors, New York, Hel- 
burn, 1923. 

Howarp Masor: Domestic Architecture of the Early 
American Republic: The Greek Revival, Phila- 
delphia, Lippincott, 1926. 

H. C. Mercer: The Origin of Log Houses in the 
United States, in Bucks County Historical Society 
Papers, vol. V (1924). 

For works dealing with single regions see the topo- 
graphical list. 
Regional works 
A wealth of local variety is shown in the numbers of 
the White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs, 
New York, 1915 to date. 


New England 


D. Mitiar: Measured Drawings of Some Colonial and 
Georgian Houses, 2 vols., New York, Architectural 
Book Publishing Company, 1916 ff. 

R. C. Kineman: New England Georgian Architecture, 
New York, ib.,1913 (measured drawings). 

J. M. Corner and E. E. Soperuorz: Domestic 
Colonial Architecture in New England, Boston, 1891 
(large photographs). 

Norman M. Isuam and A. F. Brown: Early Rhode 
Island Houses, 1895, and Early Connecticut Houses, 
1900, Providence, Preston & Rounds Company. 

[235 ] 


NOTES 


The pioneer discussions of the evolution of the early 
frame house. 

B. C. Trowsriver, ed. Old Houses of Connecticut, New 
Haven, Yale University Press, 1924. 

J. F. Ketzty: Early Connecticut Architecture, New 
York, Helburn, 1924 (measured drawings), and 
Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut, New 
Haven, Yale University Press, 1924. 


New York region 


Aymar Empury II: The Dutch Colonial House, New 
York, McBride, 1913. 

H. D. Exseruemn: Manors and Historic Homes of the 
Hudson Valley, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1924. 

W. J. Mitus: Historic Houses of New Jersey, Phila- 
delphia, Lippincott, 19038. 


Philadelphia region 


Tuompson Westcorr: The Historic Mansions and 
Buildings of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Porter & 
Coates, 1877. 

H. C. Wist and H. F. Berpteman: Colonial Architec- 
ture in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, 
Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1913. 

H. D. Exerrtetn: Colonial Homes of Philadelphia and 
its Neighborhood, Philadelphia, ib., 1912. 

A. L. Kocurr: Early Architecture of Pennsylvania, in 
Architectural Record, vol. XLVIII (1920), p. 5138; 
XLIX (1921), pp. 31, 135, 233, 811, 409, 519; L, 

[ 236] 


NOTES 


pp. 27, 147, 215, 398, LI (1922) p. 507, LII, pp. 
121, 435. 
Chesapeake region 


J. E. Cuanpizr: Colonial Architecture of Maryland, 
Pennsylvania and Virginia, Boston, 1882 (large 
photographs). 

J. M. Corner and E. Soprrnorz: Domestic Colonial 
Architecture in Maryland and Virginia, Boston, 
Boston Architectural Club, 1892 (large photo- 
graphs). 

L. A. Corrin and A. C. Houpen: Brick Architecture 
of the Colonial Period in Maryland and Virginia, 
New York, Architectural Book Publishing Company, 
1919. 

Paut Witstacu: Potomac Landings, New York, 
Doubleday, 1921. 

J. M. Hammonp: Colonial Mansions of Maryland and 
Delaware, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1914. 

H. F. Cunninenam and others: Measured Drawings of 
Georgian Architecture in the District of Columbia, 
New York, Architectural Book Publishing Com- 

pany, 1914. 

R. A. Lancaster: Historic Virginia Homes and 

Churches, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1915. 


Southeastern region 


E. R. Denmark: Architecture of the Old South, 
Atlanta, The Southern Architect and Building News, 
1926. 

[ 237] 


NOTES 


Hvucer Smitu: Dwelling Houses of Charleston, Phila- 
delphia, Lippincott, 1917. 

AusEerT Simons and Samvuet LarxHam: Charleston, 
New York, American Institute of Architects, 1927. 

E. A. Crane and E. Sopernoiz: Examples of Colonial 
Architecture in Charleston and Savannah, Boston, 
Boston Architectural Club, 1895, (large photo- 
graphs). 

Southwestern region 

Creve Hatiensecx: Spanish Missions of the Old 
Southwest, New York, Doubleday, 1926. 

Rexrorp Newcoms: Franciscan Mission Architecture 
of Alta California, New York, Architectural Book 
Publishing Company, 1916 (measured drawings), 
and The Old Mission Churches and Historic Houses 
of California, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1925. 

L. B. Prince: Spanish Mission Churches of New 
Mexico, Cedar Rapids, Torch Press, 1915. 


Biographical 

JosEPH Jackson: Early Philadelphia Architects and 
Engineers, Philadelphia, 1923. 

Kimpatt: The Colonial Amateurs and their Models: 
Peter Harrison, in Architecture, vol. LIII (1926), 
pp. 185, 209. 

LaMBETH and Mannine: Jefferson as an Architect, 
Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1913. 

Kimsatit: Thomas Jefferson, Architect, 1916. 

J. J. Jusseranp: “Mayor L’Enfant and the Federal 
City” in his With Americans of Past and Present 
Days, New York, Scribner’s, 1916. 

[238] 


NOTES 


Gienn Brown: The Octagon (Thornton), American 
Institute of Architects, n. d. 


E.S. Butrincn: The Life and Letters of Charles Bul- 
finch, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1896. 

C. A. Puace: Charles Bulfinch: Architect and Citizen, 
Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1925. 

B. H. Larrope: The Journal of Latrobe, New York, 
Appleton, 1905. 


E. L. Giruiams: A Pioneer American Architect 
(Strickland) in Architectural Record, vol. XXIII 
(1908), p. 135. 


For further references on Thornton, Hallet, and the 
other competitors for the Federal Buildings see under 
Public Works above. There are documented biograph- 
ical sketches of American architects by the present 
writer and others in the volumes of Thieme-Becker’s 
Allgemeines Kiinstlerlexikon and the Dictionary of 
American Biography. 


SINCE THE CIVIL WAR 


The chief source here is the file of journals, particu- 
larly the American Architect from 1876, the Inland 
Architect from 1881, the Architectural Review from 
1890, the Architectural Record from 1892, the Brick- 
builder and Architectural Forum from 1892, Architec- 
ture from 1900. 


Royat Corrtissoz: Leaders in American Architec- 
ture in his Art and Common Sense, New York, 
Scribner’s, 1913. 

[239] 


NOTES 


Marianna Griswotp Van Renssetaer: Henry Hob- 
son Richardson, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1888. 
Montcomery Scuvuyiter: The Works of Richard 
Morris Hunt, in Architectural Record, vol. V (1895) 

p- 97. 

Joun V. Van Pett: A Monograph of the William K. 
Vanderbilt House, New York, the Author, 1925 — 
(with biography of Richard Morris Hunt). 

Obituary of William Le Baron Jenney, in Architec- 
tural Record, vol. XXII (1907), pp. 155-157. 

Harriet Monrot: John Wellborn Root, Boston, 
Houghton Mifflin, 1896. 


Louis H. Sutuivan: The High Building Artistically 


Considered, in Lippincott’s Magazine, March, 1896. 
Louis H. Sutuivan: The Autobiography of an Idea, 
New York, American Institute of Architects, 1924. 


Louis H. Sutuivan: A System of Architectural Orna- 
ment, New York, ib., 1925. 


Kimeati: Louis Sullivan, in Architectural Record, vol. 
LVIL (1925), pp. 289-304. 


Aurrep Hoyt GrancEer: Charles Follen McKim, Bos- 
ton, Houghton Mifflin, 1913. 


Lawrence Grant Wuite: Sketches and Designs of 
Stanford White, New York, Architectural Book 
Publishing Company, 1920. 

A Monograph of the work of McKim, Mead and White, 
4 vols. folio, New York, Archi aies Book Pub- 


lishing Company, 1915. 
[240] 


NOTES 


GLENN Brown: Personal Recollections of Charles 
Follen McKim, in Architectural Record, vol. 
XXXVIIT (1915), pp. 575, 681; XX XIX (1916), 
p- 84. | 

Kimsatut: What is Modern Architecture? in Nation, 
vol. CXIX (1924), p. 128. 

Tuomas Hastines: Letter in American Architect, vol. 
XCIV (1909), pp. 3-4. 

The Works of Carrére & Hastings, in Architectural 
Record, vol. X XVII (1910), pp. 1-120. 

Cuar es Moore: Daniel H. Burnham, Boston, Hough- 
ton Mifflin, 1921. 

D. H. Burnuam and F. D. Mitztet: World’s Colum- 
bian Exposition, The Book of the Builders, Chicago, 
Columbian Memorial Pub. Soc., 1894. 

Peter B. Wicut: Daniel Hudson Burnham and his 
Associates, in Architectural Record, vol. XX XVIII 
C1915). p. 1. 


GLENN Brown: Artistic Growth of the Washington 
Plan, in Architectural Record, vol. LIX (1926), pp. 
311, 424, 571. 


A Monograph of the Work of Charles A. Platt, New 
York, Architectural Book Publishing Company, 
1913. 


The Architecture of John Russell Pope, New York, 
Helburn, 1924. 
Portraits of Ten Country Houses designed by Delano 
and Aldrich, New York, Doubleday, 1921. 
[241] 


NOTES 


Competition for the New York Court House 


MCMXIII, New York, Architectural Book Pub- 
lishing Company, n. d. 


F. M. Day and others, ed: American Country Houses 
of Today, 5 vols.. New York, Paul Wenzel, 1912- 
1926. 

Frank Luoyp Wricut: Sketches and Executed Work, 
1912. 

H. Tu. Wieperetp and others: Wendingen: Frank 
Lloyd Wright, Stantpoort, C. A. Mees, 1925. (Here 
are included Wright’s first three papers, In the 
Cause of Architecture. Others are appearing cur- 
rently in the Architectural Record. ) 

H. pve Vries: Frank Lloyd Wright, 1926. 

C. H. Wurtraxer and others: Bertram Grosvener Good- 
hue, New York, American Institute of Architects, 
1925. 

The Tribune Tower Competition, Chicago, 1923. 


B. J. Lusscuez: Manhattan, the Magical Island, New 
York, American Institute of Architects, 1927. 


Among the records of recent foreign visitors the fol- 


lowing may be particularly mentioned: 


Erich MeEnpetsoHn: Amerika: Bilderbuch eines 
Architekten, Berlin, Rudolf Mosse, 1926. Also 
his paper in the New York Times Magazine, August 
22, 1926. 


Evie Favre: America and Rome in New York Times 
Magazine, July 17, 1927. 
[242 ] 


—e 


NOTES 


JoHNNY Roosvat: America, New Found Land of 
Art, in New York Times Magazine, September 7, 
1924. 


On the work of the last generation, observed through 
a score of years with a view to writing its story, not a 
little has been gained from personal acquaintance and 
conversation with many of its masters, living and dead, 
with McKim and Mead, Cram and Day, Sullivan and 
Wright, Wilby and Corbett, and their associates and 
helpers. With Paul Cret, D. Everett Waid, Royal 
Cortissoz and Clarence Stein, among many others, I 
recall more than one stimulating discussion. To all of 
these I owe my heartiest acknowledgments. 


[243] 


4) 


INDEX 


Buildings in general are listed under the name of the town 
where they stand, except plantation houses and other buildings 
in isolated rural situations, which are under their own names. 


The entries for American architects carry their dates, where 


exactly ascertainable. 


Academic architecture, 35, 42, 
46, 70-71 
Adam style, 52, 87-90 
Adshead, S. D., 185 
Adobe, 206 
Asop’s Fables, 51 
Albany, N. Y., 89 
Van Rensselaer manor-house, 
47 
Albro, Lewis C., 207 
Alcove beds, 86 
Aldrich, Chester H. (1871- ), 
178 
Alexandria, Va., Masonic Me- 
morial, 205 
Altars, 64, 76 
American Academy in Rome, 
187 
American Academy of Art and 
Letters, 187 
American influence abroad, 116, 
185-186, 196, 198, 199-200 
Ampthill, Va., 91 
Andalusia, Pa., 104 
Annapolis, 52 
Brice house, 51 
Chase house, 47 


Apartment buildings, 184-185 
Arcade, 44, 46, 65 
Arches, 49, 50, 89, 125, 165 
triumphal, 77, 100 
Architects, amateur, 42-43, 44, 
45, 80, 81, 106 
Architects, professional, 43, 80, 
97, 106 
Art nouveau, 199, 210 
Arts and Crafts movement, 128 
Arizona, 63 
Arlington, Virginia, 103 
Ashmont, Mass., All Saints’ 
Church, 131 
Athens, Erechtheum, 96 
Parthenon, 96, 98-99, 104 
Monument of Lysicrates, 100 
Temple on the Illissus, 102 
Theseum, 99 
Athens, Ga., 105 
Atkinson, Robert, 185 
Attwood, Charles (1849-95), 
168 
Auvergne, 125 


Bach, J. S., 160 
Bacon, Henry (1866-1924), 181 


[247] 


INDEX 


Bacon’s Castle, Va., 31 
Balconies, 65, 105, 122 
Baltimore, Cathedral (Catho- 
lic), 101 
Cathedral (Episcopal), 132 
Chapel of St. Mary, 118 
Homewood, 90 
Washington Monument, 100 
Balusters, 50, 59, 89 
Banks, 95-96, 98-100, 113, 124, 
178, 182, 191 
Barboursville, Va., 91 
Barns, 59 
Baroque architecture, 42, 64 
Basilicas, 46, 206 
Beaujour, Major, 96 
Behrens, Peter, 199 
Belcher, John, 186 
Belfries, 45, 63, 64, 65 
Belmead, Va., 114 
Benjamin, Asher, 89 
Bennington, Vt., church, 75 
Bergen sandstone, 59 
‘Berks County, Pa., 59 
Berlin, 199 
Einsteinturm, 200 
Bernard, Sir Francis, 
79) 43 
Berry Hill, Va., 104 
Biddle, Nicholas, 97, 100, 104 
Biltmore, N. C., 127 
Beverly, Mass., Browne’s Folly, 
31 
Blakely, John, 96 
Blockhouses, 20 
Blois, 127 
Bodley, G. F., 1380 
Books, influence of, 42, 71 
Borie, Charles, 210 


(1711- 


Boston, 41, 77, 89 
Beacon monument, 77 
Bunker Hill Monument, 100 
Christ Church, 87 
Faneuil Hall, 48, 46 
Hancock house, 47, 50, 58 
King’s Chapel, 44 
Mason house, 87 
Museum of Fine Arts, 124 
Old South Church, 37, 45 
Old State House, 44 
Otis house, 86 
Post Office, 120 
Province house, 31 
Public Library, 164-165 
St. Paul’s church, 102 
Sergeant house, 31 
State House, 78 
Swan house, 87 
Trinity Church, 125 
Washington arch, 77 


Brackets, 36, 50, 64, 122 
Bremo, Va., 91 
Brick, 22-24, 37, 46, 122, 128, 
129, 1389, 193 
importation of, 23-24 
sun dried, 21 
Brickmaking, 24, 122 
Bridgeport, Conn., 
120 
Bridges, 135, 141 
Brown, Joseph, 45 
Brownstone, 164 
Bruce, James Coles, 104 
Brunel, Marc Isambard, (1769- 
1849) 85 
Bryn Mawr College, 129 
Buffalo, Guaranty (Pruden- 
tial) Building, 191-192 


Iranistan, 


[248] 


INDEX 


Buffalo—con’t. 
Larkin Building, 194 
Bulfinch, Charles, (1763-1844) 
77, 85, 87, 89, 178 
Burnham, Daniel Hudson, 
(1846-1912), 152-53, 166, 
168, 174, 176, 206 

Burr, Aaron, 49 

Burwell, Carter, 43 

Buttresses, 64, 65 

Byron, 112 

Byzantine style, 204 


California, 64, 207 
Cambridge, Mass., 104 
Christ Church, 44 
Harvard College, early build- 
ings, 37, 43 
Memorial Hall, 124 
Canberra, 198 
Cape Cod, 57-58 © 
Capitols, colonial, 45-46 
Federal, 78-82, 97 
state, 73, 76, 77-78, 208 
Carpenter’s Company, Phila- 
delphia, 42, 44 
Carrére, John M., (1858-1911), 
129 
Carpeaux, 159 
Casements, 22, 27, 30, 35, 128 
Cast-iron, 122, 138, 139, 144 
“Cat-and-clay,” 21, 22, 59 
“Caves,” 19 
Cedar, 21 
Ceilings, coved, 50 
plaster, 51 
ornamented, 88 
Cement, 140 
Cézanne, 160, 200 


Charleston, S. C., 90, 113 
Miles Brewton house, 48-49, 
50, 51 
Robert Brewton house, 36 
Huger house, 51 
Pinckney house, 48 
Nathaniel Russell house, 87 
St. Michael’s, 44 
St. Philip’s, 44 
Charlestown, Mass., 21 
Joseph Barrell house, 87 
Charlottesville, Va, Christ 
Church, 102 
University of Virginia, 83-84, 
91, 178-79 
Chateaux, 127, 161, 221 
Chesapeake Bay, 90 
Chicago, 151-59, 176, 192, 198- 
99, 223 
fire, 143 
Auditorium, 155 
Field warehouse, 126, 155 
Home Insurance Building, 
143 
Hull house, 192 
Tacoma Building, 144 
Tribune Building, 215 
Winslow house, 193 
World’s Fair, 165-168 
Chimayo, N. M., 64 
Chimneys, 57, 60, 127, 128 
brick, 17 
catted, 22 
clustered, 27, 31 
stone, 23 
Chimneypieces, 36, 42, 50 
Chippendale style, 42, 51 
Christ Church, Lancaster 
County, Va., 37 


[249] 


INDEX 


Churches, 19, 28-30, 37, 43-45, 
63-65, 101-02, 124, 129, 
181-32, 195-96 

Circular buildings, 181 

houses, 106-07 
rooms, 86-87 

City halls, 31, 45, 82 

Clapboards, 58 

Classic revival, 71-107 

Clay, 17, 19, 24, 63, 65; mortar, 
23 

Cleveland, O., Leader-News 
Building, 185 

Cloisters, 65 

Colleges, 37, 82-84, 126, 129, 
178-179 

Colonial architecture, 17-66 

revival, 129, 161, 206-07 

Colonnades, 80, 83, 91, 100, 167, 
178, 179, 180, 207 

Columbia, S. C., 76; Capitol, 77 

Columns, 44, 47, 48-49, 50, 72, 
73, 82, 95, 98, 103, 104, 
105 

triumphal, 77, 100 

Commission of Fine Arts, 187 

Composition ornament, 89-90 

Concrete, 135, 140, 195-197 

Connecticut, 19 

Connecticut Valley, 45, 58 

Constable, John, 112 

Cooper, James Fenimore, 105, 
114 

Cope, Walter, (1860-1902), 129 

Copley, John Singleton, 58 

Corbett, Harvey W., (1873- ), 
186, 205, 211 

Cornices, 36, 89 

Cornish, N. H., gardens, 177 


Courbet, 159° 

Craftsmanship, 128, 180-131 

Cram, Ralph Adams, (1863- ), 
130, 131 

Crescent, 89 

Cupboards, 50 


Danvers, Mass., Hooper house, 
48 

Darwin, Charles, 148, 153 

Davis, Alexander Jackson, 
(1803-1892), 99, 102, 118, 
114 

Day, Frank Miles, (1861-1918), 
129 


Delacroix, 112 
Delano, William A., (1874- ), 
178 
Delaware valley, 20 
Department stores, 138 
Detroit, 223° 
Ford factory, 197 
Domes, 64, 80-82, 83, 101, 102, 
179, 180 
Doorways, 36, 41, 42, 47, 49, 50, 
58, 88 
Dormers, 59 
Downing, Andrew Jackson, 114, 
173 : 
Drayton’s Palace, S. C., 48 
Dressing-rooms, 85 
Dublin, Custom House, 77 
Leinster House, 80 
Royal Exchange, 77, 85 
Wellington Monument, 
Dunkards, 59 
Dutch Colonial, 58, 206 
Dutch colonists, 17, 58 


100 


[250] 


INDEX 


E-plan, 31 

Kast, 151, 165, 166-167 

East Barsham, 114 

Eastlake, C. L., 128 

Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 125, 126, 
149, 154, 161, 165, 166, 
171-172 

Eclecticism, 119-32, 204-06 

Edenton, N. C., St. Paul’s, 37 

Edinburgh, National Monu- 
ment, 99 

Edgehill, Va., 91 

Egyptian architecture, 102 

Einstein, Albert, 200 

Elevators, 142 

Elizabethan style, 27, 31, 129 

Elliptical rooms, 86-87 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 125 

Endecott, John, 21 

Engineering, 198 

English colonists, 17, 20 

“English cottage style,” 114 

English influence, 19, 20-22, 28, 
81, 35, 37, 41-46, 50, 51, 
52, 75, 77, 80, 87-88, 90, 
91, 111, 114, 115, 123-24, 
128, 130, 132 

“English wigwams,” 19 

Ephrata, Pa., 59 

Erie Canal, 105 

Evolution, theory of, 148, 150 


Eyre, Wilson, (1858- ), 129 
Expositions, London, (1851), 
138 


Philadelphia Centennial, 128 
Chicago World’s Fair, (1893), 
165-168, 185 
Paris, (1900), 185 
Paris, (1925), 210 
Expression, theory of, 148-150 


Factories, 185, 186, 141, 194-95, 
196-97, 199 


Faience, 139 

Fairfield, Va., 31 

Fanlights, 49, 89 

Farmhouses, 57-60 

Farmington, Conn., 45 

Farmington, Va., 91 

Federal period, 69ff. 

Fireplace, 80, 36, 50, 193 
See also Chimneypieces, 

mantels 


Fireproofing, 189, 155, 158 

Flaubert, 159 

Florida, 129, 207 

Formalism, 159-160, 162, 163, 
167, 171-187, 195, 203-205, 
212-217 


Forts, log, 20 

Fowler, Orson Squire, 106 

Fox, Samuel M., 96 

“Frail houses,” 17 

Franciscans, 64 

Frankfort, Ky., capitol, 99 

Fredericksburg, Kenmore, 52 

Freehold, N. J. Tennent 
Church, 37 


French colonies, 63, 65 

French influence, 42, 51, 72, 76, 
77, 78, 81, 82, 85-86, 91, 
106, 120, 125-27, 171-72, 
206 

Frets, 51 

Frontiersmen, 20 

Fulton, Robert, 136 


Functionalism, 148-150, 155- 
158, 159, 183, 191, 193- 
200 


Furness, Frank, 125 


[251] 


INDEX 


Gardens, formal, 177 

Gables, 128 

Garden temples, 112 

Gables, 31, 36, 48, 49, 50; 58, 60, 
65 


stepped, 31 
“Garrisons,” 20 
Georgetown, D. C, 

Place, 90 
Georgia, 20 
Georgian architecture, 36, 41- 
53 


Germans in America, 20, 21, 59, 
123 


German influence, 29, 208, 209 
German Renaissance style, 123 
Germantown, Pa., 59 
Cliveden, 47 
Gibbs, James, 44, 75, 80 
Gilbert, Cass, (1859- 
Gilmor, Robert, 113 
Glass, 17, 22, 122-123, 197 
leaded, 27, 30, 35 
plate, 138 
Glen Cove, L. I., Manor House, 
177 
Goethe, 130, 147, 192 
Godefroi, Maximilian (c. 1760- 
1833), 112 


Goodhue, Bertram G., (1869- 
1924), 130-132, 207, 208, 
209 
Gothic style, 27-29, 35, 150, 184, 
205 
Chippendale, 51 
collegiate, 129-130 
Italian, 124 
Victorian, 124, 125 


Tudor 


), 184 


Gothic revival, 111-16, 124, 130- 
82 ; 

Governors, colonial, 20-21, 43, 
48, 49 

Gréber, Jacques, 172 

Greco, 160 | 

Greece, 98 

Greek cross, 101 

Greek revival, 74, 95-107 

Greek War of Independence, 
103, 105 

Griffin, Walter Burley, 198 

Guadet, Julien, 165 

Gulf states, 63, 105 


H-plan, 31 
Hadfield, George, 
97, 103 

Hallet, Stephen, 80, 82, 97 

Half-timber, 20, 21, 128 

Hamilton, Alexander, 85, 87, 
136° 

Hamilton, Andrew, 
1741), 45 

Hankar, Paul, 199 

Harrison, Peter, 
43, 44, 46 

Harmon, Arthur Loomis, 213 

“Harvard brick,” 129 

Harvard College, 

early buildings, 37, 43 
Memorial Hall, 124 

Haviland, John, (1793-1852), 
116 

Hastings, Thomas, (1860- )s 
129 

Herder, 147 

Hingham, Mass., “Old Ship” 
meeting-house, 29 


(d. 1826), 


(1676- 


(1716-1775), 


[252] 


INDEX 


Hoban, James, (c. 1762-1831), 
a7, 87 
Hoadley, David, (1774-1839), 
89 
Holabird, William, (1854-  ), 
144 
Hood, 59 
Hood, Raymond, (1881- )s 
215 
Hooker, Philip, (1766-1836), 89 
Hope Lodge, Horsham, Pa., 36 
Horta, Victor, 199 
Hotels, 129 
Houses, 17, 19-22, 27, 30-31, 46- 
53, 85-91, 102-07, 112-15, 
177-78, 193-94 
brick, 20, 31 
frame, 20-21, 22, 27, 30-31 
half-timbered, 20-21 
stone, 20 
log, 19-20 
palisaded, 19 
plans, 35, 47, 85-87 
Howe, Lord, 48 
Howells, John Meade, 
(1868- ), 215 
Hudson valley, 41, 58 
Hugo, Victor, 112 
Hunt, Richard Morris, (1827- 
95), 126-127 
Hurley, N. Y., 58 


Ibsen, 159 

Impressionists, 159 

Indians, 19, 63, 64 

Ingres, 160 ° 

Industrialism, 122-123, 131, 135- 
141, 151, 153 


Iron, 135, 188, 141-144, 151 
cast, 122 
Ironwork, 65 
Irving, Washington, 105, 118 
Italian gardens, 177 
Gothic, 124 
“Italian villas,’ 120 


Jacobean architecture, 27, 31 

Jails, log, 20 

James, Henry, 221 

James, John, 43 

Jamestown, first houses, 19 

church, 28 

Jefferson, Thomas, (1743-1826), 
37, 43, 49, 70, 71, 74, 76, 
17, 79, 80, 83, 86, 91, 95, 
97, 102, 103, 106, 107, 112, 
116, 175 

Jenney, William Le Baron, 
(1832-1907), 143-144 

Jesuits, 63-64 

Jones, Inigo, 41-42, 50 


Kahn, Albert, (1869- ), 196 

Kahn, Ely Jacques, (1884- _), 
214 

Kansas City, Mo., 152 

War Memorial, 207 

Karlsruhe, 78 

Kearsley, John, 
4A, 

Keats, John, 148 

Kent, William, 111 

Kentucky, 105 

Klauder, Charles Z., (1872-_ ), 
129 


(1684-1722), 


Laguna, N. M., Chapel of San 
José, 63 


[253] 


INDEX 


Lake Forest, Ill., McCormick 
house, 177 


Lake Geneva, Wis., Bartlett 
house, 192 


Lancaster County, Pa., 59 
Landscape gardening, 111, 114 
Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, 
(1766-1820), 95-98, 101, 
106, 112, 113, 116, 136, 
- 178 


Lebanon County, Pa., 59 
Ledge stone, 23, 129 
Lemoulnier, 120 
L’Enfant, Pierre Charles, 
(1754-1825), 76, 78, 79, 
88, 136, 173-74 
Lenox, Mass., church, 75 
Libraries, 81, 126, 164-65, 179 
Lime, 23 
Lincoln, Neb., capitol, 208 
Lindeberg, Harrie T, 207 
Liverpool, cathedral, 132 
Log houses, 19-20 
London, Bush House, 186 
churches, 44 
Crystal Palace, 138 
Great Fire, 23, 35 
Manchester House, 88 
Somerset House, 46 
Wellington Monument, 100 


Long Island, 58 

Louis XIV style, 51, 78 

Louis XV style, 51, 76, 85, 86, 
88 

Louisiana, 206 

Lowell, Guy, (1870-1926), 180 

Luther, Martin, 29 

Lutyens, Sir E. L., 186 


MacBean, 44 

McComb, John, (1763-1858), 82, 
89 

Machine age, 122-23, 194, 199, 
221 . 

McIntire, Samuel, (1757-1811), 
89 

McKenzie, Voorhees & Gmelin, 
216 

McKim, Charles Follen, (1847- 
1909), 160-61, 164-165, 
167, 168, 174, 175, 178, 
179, 181, 186-187, 204, 
215, 217 


McKim, Mead & White, 128, 
160-165, 171, 173, 184 
Magonigle, H. Van Buren, 
(1867- ), 207, 208 
Mangin, Joseph, 82, 116 
Mansard roof, 120 
Mantels, 50, 51, 89 
Marble, 95 
chimneypieces, 50 
Maryland, 41 
Masonry, 22, 27, 155 
Masonic temples, 113, 180 
Massachusetts Bay colony, 18 
Mausoleum, 180 
Mead, William Rutherford, 
(1846- yp Pak 
Medford, Mass., Royall house, 
47-48 
Medieval survivals, 27-28 
revival, 111-116 
Medway, S. C., 31 
Meeting-houses, 29-30, 45 
Meigs, Arthur, (1882- )s 
207 
Mendelsohn, Erich, 200 


[254] 


INDEX 


Middleton, S. C., 31 
Middletown, Conn., 58 

Mill construction, 141 

Millbach, Pa., Muller house, 59 
Milledgeville, Ga., 113 


Mills, Robert (1781-1855), 74, 
97, 100, 101, 113, 178, 179 

Missions, 63-65 

Mississippi river, 65 

Modernism, 147-217 

Monet, 159 

Monier, Joseph, 140 

Monticello, Va., 49, 86, 91 

Montpelier, Va., 91 

Monuments, 79, 100-101, 207- 

| 208 


Moorish style, 119, 167 
Morris, William, 128, 130 
Mount Airy, Va., 47 
Mount Vernon, Va., 88 
Mulberry, S. C., 31 
.Museums, 124, 138 
Musée Napoleon, 97 


Nantucket, Mass., 58, 105 

Napoleon, 74, 102 

Napoleon ITI, 125 

Nature, influence of, 130, 148, 
152, 153-154, 157-158, 159, 
192, 193 


Neo-classicism, 162-165, 166- 
168, 171-187, 203-207, 217 


New Bedford, Mass., 105 
New England, 19, 20, 23, 47, 
50, 89, 129, 206 
churches, 28, 29 
farmhouses, 57-58 
New France, 19, 65 


New Haven, Conn., 89 
Capitol, 99 
Yale College, 37 
New Jersey, 19, 58 
churches, 29 
New London, Conn., Eastover, 
177 
New Mexico, 63, 206 
New Netherlands, 19, 24 
New Orleans, 65-66 
New Palz, N. Y., 58 
New Spain, 19, 63-65 
New York, 41, 58, 59, 89, 113, 
143, 160, 206, 211-17, 221- 
24 
American Radiator Building, 
215 
apartment buildings, 184-185 
John Jacob Astor house, 127 
Broadway, 222, 223 
Bush Building, 205, 214 
Cathedral of St. John the 
Divine, 206 
Century Club, 164 
City Hall, 82 
Colonnade Row, 105 
Columbia University, 179 
Court House, 180-181 
Custom House, 99 
Federal Hall, 76, 77, 221 
Federal Reserve Bank, 185 
Fifth Avenue, 221 
Fraternity Clubs, 214 
French Chapel, 102 
Garment Center, 212 
Gerry house, 127 
Grace Church, 115 
Grand Central Station, 183 
The Grange (Hamilton), 87 


[255] 


INDEX 


New York—con’t. 
Madison Square Garden, 164 
Madison Square Presbyterian 

Church, 179 


Merchants’ Exchange, 100, 
178 

Metropolitan Life Building, 
212 

Roger Morris (Jumel) house, 
49 


Municipal Building, 184, 214 
National Academy of Design, 
124 


National City Bank, 178 

New York University, 118, 
179 

New York Telephone Build- 
ing, 216 

office buildings, 183-85, 211- 
16, 222 

Old City Hall, 31, 45, 76 

Old Post Office, 120 

Old Trinity Church, 29 

One Fifth Avenue, 205 

Park Avenue, 176, 214 

Park Theatre, 85 

Pennsylvania Station, 183 

Post Office, 178 

prison, 116 

Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monu- 
ment, 178 

Ritz Tower, 214 

‘St. Bartholomew’s, 181 

St. Patrick’s, 115 

St. Paul’s Chapel, 44, 76 

St. Vincent Ferrer, 132 

Shelton Hotel, 213, 214, 216 

Singer Building, 212 

Trinity Church, 115 


New York—con’t. 
Vanderbilt, William K., 
house, 127 
Villard houses, 164 
Wall Street, 221 
Washington Arch, 178 
Woolworth Building, 184 
World Building, 148 
Newels, 50-51 
Newport, R. I., 43 
Casino, 128 
“cottages,” 127 
Market, 46 
Redwood Library, 46 
Synagogue, 44 
Nimes, Maison Carrée, 72, 73 
Norfolk, Va. Barton Myers 
house, 90 
Northwest, 105 


Oak, 21, 31 

Oak Park, Ill, Unity Temple, 
195-196 

Obelisks, 100-101 ; 

Octagonal form, 47; houses, 
106; rooms, 86 

Office buildings, 135, 142-44, 
158, 155-59, 183-85, 191- 
92, 211-16, 222 

Olmsted, F. L., Jr., 174 

Orders, 48, 112 

Outbuildings, 60 

Overhang, 30, 58 

Owen, Robert Dale, 114 

Oxford movement, 130 


Pestum, Temple at, 103 

‘Palisaded houses, 19 

Palladio, 43, 70, 71, 106 
style of, 42, 71 


[256] 


INDEX 


Paneling, 36, 37, 50, 59 

Pantries, 86 

Parris, Alexander, (1781-1852), 
89 


Patios, 65 
Pavilions, 48 
Paris, 72, 77 
Bibliothéque Ste. Genevieve, 
165 
Exposition of 1925, 210 
Garde-meuble, 78, 79 
Hotel de Salm, 72, 79, 91 
HOtel de Ville, 120 
Louvre, 79, 120 
Madeleine, 74 
Place de la Concorde, 78 
Paterson, N. J., 186 
Penn, William, 35; 
Philadelphia, 36 
Pennsylvania, 21, 23, 59, 129, 
206 
Peristyles, 100, 104, 180, 181 
Perkins, D. H., (1867- AS 
192 
Pews, 30 
Philadelphia, 41, 51, 113, 129, 
223 
Bank of 
96 
Bank of Philadelphia, 113 
Bank of the United States, 
85 
2nd Bank of the 
States, 98, 99 
Belmont, 51 
Bingham house, 86, 88 
Carpenter’s Company, 42, 44 
Cedar Grove, 36 
Christ Church, 44, 46 


house, 


Pennsylvania, 95, 


United 


Philadelphia—con’t. 
Centennial Exposition, Eng- 
lish building, 128 


Eastern Penitentiary, 116 

Fidelity Mutual Building, 
210 

First shelters, 19 

Girard College, 100 

Independence Hall, 45 

Lansdowne, 49 

Lemon Hill, 87 

Library, 81 

Merchant’s Exchange, 100 

Morris “folly,” 88-89 

Mount Pleasant, 47, 48 

Museum of Art, 177, 210 

Old Post Office, 120 

Parkway, 176 


Pennsylvania Academy of 
the Fine Arts, 97-98, 
124, 125 


Powel house, 52 
President’s House, 88 
John Reynolds (Morris) 
house, 75 
Sedgeley, 112 
Solitude, 88 
State House, 45 
Stenton, 36 
University of Pennsylvania, 
129 
Water Works, 106, 136 
Woodlands, 87, 88 
see also Germantown 
Philippines, 176 
Piazzas, 58 
Piedmont, 91, 206 
Pilasters, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 
50, 58, 89 


[257] 


INDEX 


Pine, 30 

Pittsburgh, Pa., 
Church, 131 

Plantation houses, 60, 104, 114- 
15 

Platt, Charles A., (1861- ys 
177, 185-217 

Plymouth Colony, 19, 57-58 

Pond, I. K., (1857- ), 192 

Poore, Ben Perley, 129 

Pope, John Russell, (1874- ), 
178, 180 


Poplar Forest, Va., 106 
Porticoes, 36, 41, 44, 45, 46, 48- 
49, 72, 73, 76, 83-84, 88, 
91, 95, 98, 101, 104, 180 
Portland, Me., 89 
Portsmouth, N. H., 41, 129 
McPhaedris house, 36 
Post-colonial work, 75 
Power houses, 197, 199 
“Prairie style,” 198 
Primitive shelters, 17-20 
Princeton University, 129, 130 
Prisons, 115-116, 126 
log, 20 
Providence Plantation, 23 
Providence, R. I. Joseph 
Brown house, 75 
First Baptist Church, 45 
Provincial types, 57-66, 128-29 
Public buildings, 41, 45-46, 69, 
72-74, 76-82, 97-101, 175, 
178, 211 
Pugin, Augustus Welby, 115, 
149, 150 
Put-in-Bay, O., 
morial, 178 


Calvary 


Perry Me- 


Queen Anne movement, 128, 161 


Radnor, Pa., St. David’s, 29 

Railway stations, 135, 140-41, 
182-83 

Ramée, Joseph, (d. 1842), 84, 
100 


Rancho Camulos, Cal., 65 
Realism, 159 
Red House, Bexley Heath, 128 
Regensburg, Walhalla, 99 
Renaissance, 27-28 

Italian, 149, 164 

German, 123 


Renwick, James, 114, 115, 130 
Republican period, 69ff. 
Rhode Island, 23 
Richards, Charles R., 210 
Richardson, A. E., 185 
Richardson, Henry Hobson, 
(1838-86), 125-126, 130, 
155, 161, 166, 217 
Richmond, H. P., 181 
Richmond, Va., 72, 76 
Capitol, 73, 74, 79 
Monumental Church, 102 
Penitentiary, 116 


Riverside, Ill., Coonley house, ee 


194 


Roche, Martin, 144 

Rodin, 159 

Roman influence, 71-72 

Romanticism, 111-116, 124, 125, 
130, 161, 196, 208 

Romanesque style, 114, 125-126, 
166, 167, 204, 205, 213 


Rome, 77 
Cancellaria, 164 


[258] 


as a ele 


INDEX 


Rome—con’t. 
Colosseum, 46 
Pantheon, 83, 84 
Mausoleum of Hadrian, 181 
Roofs, 21, 27, 28, 35, 57-60, 63, 
65, 114, 127, 193; gam- 
brel, 86, 59; mansard, 
10 
Root, John Wellborn, (1887- ),; 
152, 153, 155, 166 
Rosewell, Va., 48 
Rough-cast, 128 
Roxbury, Mass., Shirley house, 
48 
Ruskin, John, 13, 123, 125, 1380, 
149, 150, 185 
Russia, 107 
Rustication, 47, 65, 82 


Saarinen, Eliel, 215 
Salem, Mass., 21, 41, 89, 129 
Derby Mansion, 89 
Salons, 86-87 
St. Augustine, Fla., Cathedral, 
63 
Governor’s House, 63 
St. Gaudens, Augustus, 174, 177 
St. Louis, Wainwright Build- 
ing, 156-59, 191-92 
Wainwright mausoleum, 191 
St. Luke’s, Isle of Wight Coun- 
ty, Va., 28 
St. Petersburg, 78 
San Antonio, Tex., Missions, 64 
San Diego, Cal., Mission, 64 
Estudillo house, 65 
San Francisco, 176 
Mission, 64 
San Gabriel, Cal., 65 


San Juan Capistrano, Cal., 65 
San Xavier del Bac, Arizona, 
64 
Santa Barbara, Cal., 
Mission, 65 
De la Guerra house, 65 
Santa Fé, N. M., Palace, 65 
Sash windows, 36 
Sawmills, 22 
Savannah, Ga., 113 
Saxe-Weimar, Bernhard, von, 
98 


Schenectady, N. Y., Union Col- 
lege, 84 

Schuylkill valley, 23 

Science, influence of, 147-148, 
194 


Scotland, 107 

Scott, Sir Gilbert, 182 
Scott, Sir Walter, 112 
Scroll-saw, 122 

Secession, 199 

Sedding, J. D., 130 
Semper, Gottfried, 150, 152 
Set-backs, 211 


Shaw, Howard Van D., (1869- 
1926), 192 


Shaw, Norman, 128, 186 
Shellwork, 51, 52 

Sheathing, 31, 36, 128 
Shingles, 21, 37, 58, 59 

Shirley, Va., 36 

Shops, 138 

Short Hills, N. J., Casino, 128 
Shutters, 22 

Side-lights, 89 

Skylights, 138 


[259] 


INDEX 


Sky-scrapers, 142-44, 183-85, 
200, 203, 205, 211-17, 221- 
24 

Slate, 21 

Smibert, John, (1688-1751), 43 

Smith, Robert, (d. 1777), 44 

Sod, 17 

South, 60, 88, 91, 113 

South Carolina, 31, 41 

Southwest, 65 

Spanish colonial, 129, 131, 206- 
07 

Spanish Colonies, 63-65 

Spatial form, 47, 86-87, 101, 
179, 182-83 

Spotswood, Alexander, 43 

Springfield, Mass., civic group, 
205 

Spring Green, Wis., Taliesin, 
194 

Stairs, 46, 47, 50, 82, 86, 87 

State houses, 45-46, 73, 77-78 

Staunton Hill, Va., 114-115 

Steel, 135, 189, 142, 144, 155, 
159, 166, 167, 183, 184, 
185, 191, 211, 213 

sash, 197 

Steeples, 21, 44, 45 

Stewardson, John, (1858-1898), 
129 

Stone, 22-23, 58, 59, 60, 129 

Stratford, Va., 31 

Strawberry Hill, 111 

Strickland, William, (1787- 
1854), 97, 98, 100, 113 

Stucco, 59, 114 

Sullivan, Louis, (1856-1924), 

125, 142, 152, 153-159, 

167, 183, 185, 191-192, 

200, 215, 216 


Surveyor of the Public Build- 
ings, 97 

Swan-neck, 42 

Swedish colonists, 17, 20 

Swiss colonists, 20 

Symmetry, 30 


Tabernacles, 50 

Tarrytown, N. Y., Sunnyside, 
113 

Temple, imitation of, 72-74, 80, 
83-84, 91, 95-96, 98-100, 
102-106, 114, 180, 181 

Terra cotta, 189, 158 

Tessé, Comtesse de, 72 

Texas, 63 

Thatch, 17, 21-22 

Theatres, 85 

Thomaston, Me., Henry Knox 
house, 87 

Thornton, William, (1759-1828), 
81, 89, 90, 96, 97 

Tidewater region, 24, 41 

Tile, 21, 65 

Timber, abundance of, 17, 22 . 

Tokio, Imperial Hotel, 196 

Tolstoi, 159 

Towers, 44, 64, 114, 125, 211-17 

Town, Ithiel, 99, 100 

Town halls, 126 

Town planning, 76, 78, 173-77 

Tracery, 29 

Trappe, Pa. Muhlenberg’s — 
church, 29-30 

Triumphal arch, 77, 100 

column 77, 100 

Tryon, Governor, 43 

Tuckahoe, Va., 31 

Tucker, George, 98 

Tudor style, 129 


[260] 


: 
| 


a 


INDEX 


Union College, 84 

University of Pennsylvania, 
129 

University of Virginia, 83-84, 
91, 178-179 

Universities, see also Colleges 

Upjohn, Richard, (1802-78), 
115 


Valois, style of, 127 

Van Brunt, Henry, 152 

Vaults, 64, 113, 182 

Versailles, 78 

Victorian style, 122, 175 
Gothic, 124, 125 

Vienna, 199, 210 

Villa Rotonda type, 72, 80, 106 

Viollet-le-Duc, 149, 150-151, 152 

Virginia, 23, 28, 41, 73, 206 


Wagner, Otto, 199 
Wagner, Richard, 159 
Wainscot, 31 
Walker, Ralph T., 216 
Walter, Thomas U., (1804- 
1888), 100 
Walpole, Horace, 111 
Waltham, Mass., Gore house, 
87 
Lyman house, 87 
Washington, George, 88 
Washington, D. C., 76, 78-82 
Capitol, 79, 81, 97, 100, 122 
Cathedral, 206 
Lincoln Memorial, 174-75, 
181-82 
Mall, 78 
National Academy of 
Sciences, 200 


[261] 


Washington, D. C.—con’t. 
Octagon, 90 
Park Commission Plan, 173- 
76 


President’s House, see White 
House 


St. John’s, 101 

Smithsonian Institution, 114 

State Department, 120 

Temple of the Scottish Rite, 
180 


Treasury, 100, 178 


Washington Monument, 173- 
74 


White House, 78, 79-80, 87, 
91, 175 


Watertown, Mass., Oakley, 87 

Wattle, 17, 19 

Weather-boards, 21, 30 

Webster, Noah, 70 

Wellford, Robert, 90 

Wells, Joseph Morrill, 161-162 

Welsh, 29, 59 

West, 151-159, 165, 166-67, 198 

West Newbury, Mass., Indian 
Hill, 129 

West Point, N. Y., Military 
Academy, 131 

Westover, Va., 47, 51 

White, Stanford, (1853-1906), 
161, 164, 178, 179-180, 205 

Whitehall, Md., 47 

Whitewash, 58, 63 

Whitman, Walt, 160 

Wigwams, English, 19 

Wilby, Ernest, 196, 198 

William and Mary College, 37 

Williams, Roger, 23 


- 


Williamsburg, Va. Bruton Wren, Sir 
Church, 37, 43 44, 18 
Capitol, 45 Wright, Fra 
Governor’s Palace, 72 AY a-190 
William and Mary College, 37 
Wilton, Double Cube, 50 
Windows, 17, 22, 36, 47-48, 50, 
64, 65, 122-23, 197 Biss 
casement, 22, 27, 30, 35, 128 Zantzinger, Cle 
Palladian, 41 210) ae 
sash, 836 Zola, 159 


Winthrop, John, 18,21 Zoning law, 2 


Manor, 52 


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